Teaching Tip #21 Are you really a teacher or are you a presenter? If your students are actively learning and applying that learning, congratulations, you are a teacher! Sometimes we find as teachers that we are simply presenters….teachers who do too much talking and telling, then inevitably feel that we didn’t cover everything we wanted or should have covered. It’s time to stop spending three weeks trying to cram everything we know about the Civil War into the heads of our students; after all, it took four years for the Civil War to happen, and we only have 15 school days to cover the event! The most effective teacher understands that to teach effectively he is simply going to whet the students’ appetite about the topic and do it well. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to promote active learning. Identify two or three primary issues or principles that you want students to know and let those topics govern how you teach your unit. Tell your students the objectives of your unit; and then have them select a key individual, key document, or key event which they can research and present to the class. In a three-week unit, consider allowing two weeks for your teaching time, three days for presentations, one day for wrap-up, and one day for assessment. By telling students the objectives at the beginning of the unit, you are guiding them in their research and in their attentiveness to your lessons. This should give them a better framework for their own presentations. Through this process, so much more information will be covered….and student learning will be so much more personalized. Then …. voila! You have created lovers of the Civil War, and you got to sit back and enjoy watching your students’ inner genius emerge as they become lovers of learning! And THAT is the highest level of teaching.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 12:18:25 +0000
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