Nobody knows for sure where they’re going to wind up as a teacher, although some of us seem to have a better idea than others, namely me. I have no idea whether I’ll be in a high school working with Huckleberry Finn or reading Mr. Popper’s Penguins out loud to third graders. Both great books, although one is a bit more respected. But I can assume based on my own educational background that I will probably be teaching English or Writing in one form or another. That is why I’ve chosen for this exercise to work within Standards 8.1, more specifically Strand C – Communication and Collaboration.
One thing that all teachers past, present, and future can agree on is that no one subject is for everyone. If you’re teaching math, you’re going to wind up with a couple numbers kids and a couple kids who think everything your saying is gibberish and the same the other way around. Even a high-level music teacher is probably going to have at least one kid who is absolutely tone-deaf, but still needs to fulfill an arts requirement. Trust me, there were enough kids in our chorus who shouldn’t have been. But they still had to learn to read their sheet music and keep up with the rest of the group. In this scenario, the answer was easy, if you didn’t know what you were doing, you asked the kid next to you who did.
An English class isn’t all that different. Some kids are just going to get it quicker than others. You can’t leave any kids behind, but you also can’t slow down so much that the children who are excelling are getting ignored. This is why almost all of my English teachers favored more of an open-communication classroom as opposed to the lecture type. They realized that we weren’t just learning from them, but from each other as well. Today, in a more technologically advanced age, this idea is arguably even more important. After all if we’re making blogs and web pages to allow us to help the students at all hours, we should be showing them how to use these same resources to help each other more easily.
School forces everybody to learn at a certain rate so that they have the information come test-time, but the teacher is not the only place for them to get their information. They learn from other kids, from other sources, and it is very important for students to know from an early age that they are part of a supportive group. Working together is an important life-skill that never goes away, and starting early will not only reinforce that later in a student’s educational and professional life, but also when they’re younger and inclined to feel more alone. It might even make the social minefield of high school a little easier to navigate. (I apologize for using such a tired metaphor)
Seems like you understand the standard. Now the difficult part is planning to instruct in this manner. What specific learning objectives and technology skills will you be targeting? Just making the classroom an open-ended forum for discussion is not instruction. It is a great opportunity for students to practice what they have learned from instruction - making a coherent and cogent argument; stating facts backed by evidence; listening to an argument and contributing to it; etc.
ReplyDeleteIt is easy to come up with ideas and great activities, but way to often do teachers make the assumption students have the skills and neglect to scaffold the experiences so they can build on prior knowledge and understandings.
That is the next step in lesson design.