Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Pedagogy

  • Cite, I say, Cite! Student engagement & improved learning

    I was asked to find some sources to support this statement I made:

    Student engagement is primary. Of course it guarantees learning.

    Here are a few. I’m hoping you can add some more :)

    Engagement Theories

    Strategies and how-to’s

    And, really, I can go on. Some of you know how much I love to do research! But I’m hoping for you to help out here. What proof do you have that engagement improves learning? What do you base that proof on?

    Thanks!

  • Let them be bored! For real?

    Joanne Jacobs recently posted some data about boredom levels among high school students. She closed the post with a quote from a principal in Hawaii who, when confronted with the stats that 50% of the students in his school liked school, asked the questions – “What about the rest of the kids? What are those kids doing?” (data from Teaching Now – News Flash: High School Students Are Bored.)

    Those are the kinds of questions that help to create challenging, engaging schools. I was a bit … displaced … to read some of the comments to her post. For me they represent a huge disconnect between adults (some) and students (most), steeped in a bitter brew. Or maybe those who feel that way are bored in their own lives (not challenged) and don’t feel that anyone deserves a non-boring life. Or maybe… I don’t know. But they certainly don’t represent the ‘it takes a village’ attitude we need for raising good kids. I don’t see caring. I don’t see hope.

    My query is, just how well do the comments represent what the majority of people think about learning in high school?

    • Do most adults in a given school community (parents, in particular) think that we should just make the kids sit and listen because that’s the best way to learn?
    • Do people really think that high school is a place where we should be learning how to sit still for long periods of time?
    • Can it be true that people think boredom is necessary?
    • Are educators working against the grain of community ideals?

    Yay for Topher who took the time to point out the details of the issue, as presented in the article upon which the post was based. I love how he concludes his comment:

    …it’s also important to note that students in middle and high schools, while far from being mature adults, are not dullards or wild animals who need to be tamed and broken in. It’s disheartening to see how quickly people tend to forget what it’s like to be in a lecture-only classroom and to actually perpetuate the cycle of (usually – some lecture-only teachers are great) bad teaching.

    I strive to make my classroom an active place of learning, one in which the students enjoy being. I know that it doesn’t always happen, especially when juggling a number of different courses a term. The thing is, I talk to my students and am always working towards engagement. I can not imagine teaching any other way. I can not imagine cultivating a sense of boredom as a life lesson in how to learn. I just can’t.

    ***The image was taken from a strange little blog post about observational data re: the stereotypes of asian and white students collected while the author was bored in class:

    I’m in class for four hours a day, which means I am bored to the brink of insanity 20 hours a week. I’m amazed I’m not bald from pulling my hair out from the roots. There’s nothing else to do but to analyze the people in my classes.

  • the very best teachers…

    Just saw this tweet. Felt the need to record it.

    The very best teachers spend every day of their lives ignoring or subverting the curriculum

    via @paulawhite, via @Neilstephenson, via @kmadolf, via @alfiekohn or something like that…

  • Is lecture a 4-letter word? Following up a year later

    Today I received a comment from Miss Teacha on a post I published almost a year ago called Is ‘lecture’ a 4-letter word? She continues our love-hate relationship conversation about lecture. I started to write my reply as a comment and then decided to post it as its own post. So here it is.

    Thanks for following up on this conversation, Miss Teacha! I think the mark of a successful lecture is when you need to calm the class down, when you need to redirect their energy. Lecture is not merely a content delivery system, though it can be and often has the reputation of being solely that.

    I no longer teach economics. The required course for Grade 11 has been changed to Contemporary World Issues beginning this year. It’s a course based on themes rather than specific content and I am in the middle of a section on the themes of tension and conflict using information from different areas of the world – Monks protesting in Burma; Seal Hunters in Nunavut, the Maritime provinces, and Quebec; living in the Gaza strip; living in Sri Lanka… *** (see below)

    There is SO much content that if I lectured it all they would never get to the juicy stuff of developing their own definitions of tension and conflict or debating different intervention strategies. So I give them articles, music, video to read, listen to, view, and talk about in small groups. They check their understanding with me during group and class discussions – sometimes I point them to the computers for background research and sometimes I give them the background (and sometimes I even let them know that I don’t know the background very well and we research it together).

    When I give them the background it may be done as a whole class exercise, where I stop activity and give background to the entire class, or to individual groups, depending on the need. If only 1 group isn’t getting something, why make others who do get it stop what they are doing?

    I am finding that this kind of lecture is effective because the students see the need for it. The lecture happens because they have asked for it and not because a) it’s easier for me or b) it’s what I think they should learn. They often interrupt in order to ask questions and link what I am saying to their articles or videos or songs or however it is they are gathering their information.

    So, again, lecture does not have to be a 4-letter word. Thanks to Miss Teach for following up on this conversation.

    ***I am lucky that this unit (we call them Learning Evaluation Situations (LES) in Quebec) has been developed for the course by a Quebec English schools support centre. It is the only teaching material for this course that has been made available to us in English so far, beyond the curricular guidelines (basically the competencies (like standards) and their descriptors). Apparently there is a textbook that is being published in sections but I have yet to see it.

  • On de-rubricizing

    I almost forgot about my favourite line from yesterday’s QPAT convention keynote speaker, Alfie Kohn.

    He said it as I was leaving the room so it didn’t end up in my not-live blog post but I just found the page where I scribbled it as I was making my way to my car:


    The whole can not be reduced to the sum of its rubricized parts!


    For a long time now I have been sceptical of the whole rubric frenzy. Must have a rubric, must have a rubric. Why? Why should we tell kids exactly what our expectations are and in such minute detail? I call that a creativity killer. Give them some parameters. If you are expecting the result to be some kind of multimedia presentation let them know that, give them the guiding question, maybe a few resources to get them going, to raise the velcro in their brains, but then let them experiment!


    Let them show me what they can do without spelling it out for them. Rubrics lower the bar for our students. It is telling them that we do not trust they can do anything worthwhile without our providing them with all of the pieces. Kids will rise to the bar we set for them whether it be high or low.I like to push the limits of height.


    A line that I find myself quoting on a regular basis is

    Why do anything unless it is going to be great. (Peter Block)

    I try to instill this in my students. They ask – why do I have to use proper letter-writing style elements in history when I write a letter to the King of France as a character from New France in 1665 offering ideas for how to stimulate population growth in the new colony? This is history, not English! I answer, why do anything unless it is going to be great?

    I insist on learning with this philosophical slant. That being said, I better get to my readings. I have a paer due next week on an aspect of education for Native kids in Canada. I need to do some more reading so I can write a great paper.

    Rubric, Shmubric.