December 27, 2012

  • Less Teachin', More Learnin' ?

    The interesting chunks of story below are from here.

    She did not give us a list of countries, but she laid out a lot of images of different countries and asked us to look around to figure out which ones we were interested in writing about. (I often wonder what she would have done with the Internet during this project.) As I looked through the images, I was totally drawn to the country of Brazil and knew that was what I wanted to learn more about.  Instead of sharing what things we had to write about for our grade, she asked us to develop questions of what we wanted to learn.

    “Huh?  You want ME to develop the questions?  How will I know what you want me to show you if you don’t tell me what you want?”I was actually a little upset about the assignment at first.  At a young age, I had already seemingly mastered school.  You tell me what you need, and I will give you that.  You ask the questions, I give you the answers.  A very simple process and probably why I don’t remember much about my “learning” in elementary school.Mrs. Sloane, who was our social studies teacher that year had thrown me off.  This seemingly was way too much thinking and not enough doing. 
    Cut to him teaching Health years later:

    I took all of the curriculum objectives, put them on a board and told the kids that we were going to try something different.  They would pick one of the objectives that they were interested in, and teach it to the class.  My time would be more focused on planning for the “important” subjects and in reality, they could do the teaching for me.  The kids looked at me as if I was crazy when they should have looked at me as being lazy.  They asked me how they needed to present it and I simply told them that it would be up to them.  I would expect them to do what they need to learn about their curriculum, explore some questions that they had about the objective, and present in a way that they thought would be compelling to others.  I also told them that instead of doing this for 40 minutes a week, we were going to spend every afternoon on it for a few weeks.  To me, this was a way to get through this curriculum so that I could do the other stuff.

    Then a weird thing happened.  Kids everyday were coming to class and asking, “When are we doing health?”, and it became their obsession.  They were spending their lunch hours, home time, and any minute going over their topic.  I was no longer the teacher but acted more like an academic advisor providing help along the way.  Way less time teaching and a lot more time learning.  They were curious about their topics in a way than if I stood in front of the room and shared with them my knowledge, I could not replicate.
    How can incorporate these goals of his?

    -Give students the opportunity to explore what they are interested in.

    -Help them ask powerful questions.
    -Give them time to explore.
    -Students should be able to share what they have learned in a compelling way.