Category: Pedagogy

  • What does your best teaching look like?

    I have a new blog. It’s called Teaching is a Verb and I want to collect stories about actual teaching practice there.

    The long term goal of the blog is to connect teachers to teachers by providing a framework for us to visit each other’s classrooms. We have so much to learn from each other.

    Anyone can register and share stories from their actual teaching practice there, or stories of teaching practice they have seen and admire.

    I’ve started with my own story, and a question. I’m cross-posting it here.

    What does your best teaching look like?

    You know, this blog is called Teaching is a Verb yet when I answer the question I realize that examples of my ‘best’ teaching happen when I am not in the room, during those moments when I am seemingly not doing anything directly related to learning.

    Example.
    I spent much of one day last week, or maybe the week before, meeting with students in crises. Every once in a while we have a day like that (here’s a detailed account of one of those days from last year).

    I walked into my Grade 11 CWI (Contemporary World Issues) class about 20 minutes into the period. They were quiet and had their laptops in front of them (we did a lot of fundraising last year and bought 18 mini laptops!). I figured they were taking advantage of the free time and were checking email, listening to music.

    Get ready for this: they were ALL working on this assignment. I had not yet assigned it.

    They went to our blog, read the new assignment, and began their research. The quiet dissipated as I walked in with, Tracy, I think I need to change my article, and Look at what I’ve found, I think there’s a connection here, can you look?, etc…

    This was a class that only a week earlier had to be stopped numerous times during each period in order to regroup and address issues of silliness, noise, etc. I had taken away their seating privileges because they weren’t making smart choices in that area (sitting with friends who distract…), I spent time each class with one or another student in the den having conversations about their behaviour.

    And then I realized it was about a month into the school year and that this was about the time that teaching and learning really starts.

    So what does my best teaching look like? It ‘looks’ like nothing when it is happening but it is actually made up of at least a month’s worth of and ongoing consistent classroom structure, making connections with individual students, and providing them with work that they can find meaning in for themselves and create meaning from together.

    The best thing about this is it eventually frees me up to work with individual students on either technical issues to do with assignments, personal issues that require some out of class intervention, comprehension issues, etc…

    Here is an example of that kind of work for a course in Contemporary World Issues. It’s what they are working on right now.
    Personal News Story Project

    What does your best teaching look like?

  • Should process trump content?

    You know, I used to think this. I used to think that as long as we taught the right tools our kids would be able to use them anywhere. They’d just plug in the right content and be done with it. It was the process that they needed to learn. Who cared about all that stuff we’re learning about, all that content-y stuff. That was irrelevant. As a teacher I thought I could teach just about anything – I was focusing on process so it didn’t matter how well I knew the content.

    But you know what? Experience is shifting that view. I’ve been teaching for 13 years now and am constantly working at different levels, teaching different subjects, mainly to kids who learn in alternative ways. Last year was the first time I taught attempted to teach Grade 10 Math. Ditto for Grade 11 Economics. Math, I gave up on. After the first term I switched with another teacher who was perfectly happy not having to grade the English essays I traded for it.

    The thing is I was so unfamiliar with the content that I could not merge it with process. I know how to teach/model different ways to help kids think, to help them think together and to visualize it both personally and within a community. That’s one of the reasons why I offered to teach this class. Last year was the first year of Quebec reform in Grade 10. Reform is competency-based learning and is very much centered around methodology and student-centered learning processes. My instinct was to focus on process and just plug in the content as I go.

    What a disservice to the students and what a frustration for me. I felt highly incompetent as a teacher. Though I know process, I had almost no idea what to do with it in the face of the content I was teaching myself as I went, just keeping a step or two ahead of the students. How could I possibly challenge the students who already knew the stuff or who got it right away? I spent much more time on classroom management in that class than in others. Even with the same group of students once I started teaching them English.

    Courses like English and Ethics, or History. Those I could do. I know those courses very well. I was able to use collaborative learning methodologies because I could keep a finger on the heart beat of what we were learning as we were going through the process of learning. I could helicopter back and forth from process to content very easily – say, from organization of an analysis (be it on paper or in some kind of a multimedia format) to using appropriate terminology as they analyzed different text.

    That’s from the teaching perspective. I also could feel the confidence of my students in me grow. They know when you don’t know your stuff. It is a disservice to be a teacher and to not know your content intimately. I don’t just mean knowing it, I mean knowing it.

    So – a year ago I never thought I would say this but I am now – we can not allow process to trump content. Ok, it’s a momentous occasion, I’ll say it again.

    We can not allow process to trump content.

    They both need to be there. The problem is that for a long time (and still, in some places, ok, maybe many places) content has been allowed to trump process. Education has a long history of teachers shoveling content down the brains of their students using whatever process worked for them. One.

    I think that in order to counterbalance that history some people are bending too far in the direction of process/methodology (what we call cross-curricular competencies in Quebec) and are forgetting the important role that content does play in the classroom, in teacher education, in teacher placement, in learning.

  • New Media Literacies? Please.

    This post began as a comment to The New Media Literacies by Susan Carter Morgan over at scmorgan: teacher, learner, which, by the way, is my addition to the One Comment Project (#OCP) for today.

    I have a hard time with the term ‘media literacies’. These aren’t literacies. Plain and simple. They are tools and networks. So often literacy is confused with context and tools.

    Why does this matter?
    Because when people start to talk about tools and context as literacy they shift their focus to the tools rather than keeping their eyes on the big picture.

    We see schools, teachers, districts seeking out technology for their schools and classrooms and then we end up with computer labs that aren’t used because many teachers don’t know how to manage learning in a computer lab yet. Or interactive white boards (big expensive smart boards) that are used to enhance lecture because teachers don’t know what else to do with them yet. Or professional development that advocates for the use of social networking in classrooms within schools whose IT departments ban social networking sites on the school’s network.

    As Angela recently wrote in Needing a Framework to Facilitate Learning,

    It’s impossible to make choices around tech tools until we understand where we need to support kids better as learners and create plans for accomplishing that. These plans have to be systemic in nature in order to effect change. This requires expertise in so much more than technology.

    This is a theme I’ve been writing and talking about for a long time. What I am happy about is that lately I am seeing more and more blog posts, like Angela’s, around the same ideas. What ideas? That we need to focus on professional development. That we need to re-connect teachers with their passion for teaching in order to clear the path for change in how they teach. In order to re-connect teachers with the children in their classrooms and their needs and in order to teach teachers the skills they need to answer to these needs in a collaborative, systematic, systemic, mindful way.

    Literacy is about understanding the world around us through symbols that are used to create meaning, mainly through text and the various ways text is presented. We can do that through a variety of hard and soft tools. But the big picture for us teachers is how we will use the tools at our disposal to help our students develop their literate selves.

    Thoughts?

  • Driving, listening, and drafting new models

    This could have been taken on my road :) A typical country drive view around these here parts ;) Photo from Ramps diarise. Click for source.
    This could have been taken on my road :) A typical country drive view around these here parts ;) Photo from Ramps diarise. Click for source.

    I live pretty far from most things (except the corn fields, they’re close by) and when I need something I jump in my car. The other night it took 2 hours to pick up dog food… but that was a mistake (Note to self – don’t try new routes while the dogs are waiting for their supper at home).

    Luckily, in any direction the drive is beautiful, relaxing – no traffic, just trees, open highway or back country roads. Oh, and I live in Ontario so those roads are nice and smooth :) Hilariously, even on the back country roads, you can be driving blind and know the absolute moment you enter Quebec by the bumpity-bump-bump of the tarmac under your tires.

    I’ve started to listen to books on tape, er, mp3 while I drive. I’ve attempted to do that before but never really got into anything enough to listen to all of it. Perhaps because I lived in the city, where drives were short and, when they weren’t, were fraught with traffic – and one must step lively in Quebec traffic, even while driving! Now though, driving while listening seems to be the perfect combination of busy-ness to help keep me focused on the story being told, and the act of listening helps to keep me focused on the road ahead as well.

    I’m bouncing between two books right now, depending on my mood. The novel is The Shack. Interesting, even for a Jew ;) I’ve decided the story was wonderfully crafted because the first part drew me in so completely that I am open to the unfolding of the mystery of the Catholic holy trinity that is happening now. If the story had begun with Mack meeting God, as a joyful black woman cooking dinner, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost in a shack in the woods I would not have made it too far.

    Click the image to read a nytimes review of the book.
    Click the image to read a nytimes review of the book.
    The 2nd book is Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. It is available for free in digital forms, clicking the title gets you to the Learn Out Loud download site. Alternatively you can go to The Long Tail, Chris Anderson’s blog, and read a scribd version of Free or hear it through the blog. He describes the present concept of ‘free’, how it developed historically to how it may be implicated in the development of new global economies. Oh heck, I’ll embed the scribd document right here. Well, at the bottom of this post.

     

    It’s that last bit that got me buzzing. First off, it’s a great listen – Chris Anderson’s voice is engaging – and he talks about shifting views of business in the 21st century.

    In (oh dear, don’t say it…) a little over a month I will be teaching a course called Contemporary World. It’s a new course, a product of the Quebec education reform. Since I will be teaching it in the English sector, we don’t have English language materials available to us yet. I am not hedging any bets that the materials will be ready by the beginning of the school year so I have looked at the overarching themes, as described in the French resources, and have started to create my own materials, as have other teachers. There’s a Contemporary World Ning to help us collaborate, and here is a wonderful example of the type of work that is being done to create an English LES on Wealth (Learning and Evaluation Situation).

    Anderson talks about conceptual beliefs around free, how people grounded in the 20th century don’t think anything is really free – ‘there’s always a catch’ – and how people grounded in the 21st century think differently. There is a paradigmatic shift happening in the economic world today and the concept of ‘free’ is at its heart.

    What I like about Anderson’s book is how it approaches the topic of free as an emerging economic model. I’m thinking about how my students can create new economic models from what they hear about in this book along with their own research and the conversations that emerge from that.

    I’m still throwing ideas around in my head, I’d love to collaborate with others on this. I think I’ll cross-post part of this over at the ning.

    FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson (Read in Fullscreen)

  • Sunday morning quickie re: learning & assessment

    Yup, we definitely need to continue re-thinking learning and assessment.

    Content is cheap and easy to access.

    We need to be learning and assessing context and skills – how we manipulate content to create new contexts.

    Top News – High-tech cheating? Students see it differently.

    Thanks to @scottmcleod for this link.