If “a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down,” providing students with meaning and context makes a lesson learnable. We have many homilies for this. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” seems most apt. AI can present a student with a sound strategy for learning, but it comes up short in providing the necessary meaningful context for learning that a teacher can provide. AI is masterful in the science of teaching but fails in the art of teaching. Continue reading
The Art of Teaching Requires Teachers
When Self-evident Truths Fail, Teacher Role Modeling Matters
If individuals mimic self-interested rather than self-evident truths, that is what individuals, then families, then communities become. Values beget intentions and intentions beget actions and actions create outcomes and outcomes reinforce values and on it goes. Our children and grandchildren deserve and need adults in their world who believe in and value self-evident truths. Role modeling matters and teachers can be role models for a better future for all children. Continue reading
Slow Down, Enjoy the Aha Moments
In all successful learning there is a moment of insight when the brain understands a resolution of a problem or a question. It is not simply that the child got to a right answer. It is the reality that she knows the process of getting there and can repeat it with confidence. It is “AHA!” Continue reading
The Value and Power of the Teacher’s Lane
What they do not or cannot understand is that our professional lane is not to teach a particular point of view but to teach all children to understand point of view, to think about and evaluate point of view, and to establish their own informed point of view. We use teaching strategies based upon pure inquiry not biased inquiry. Life and its events will shape a child’s thinking and perspective. Our mission is met when children know how to apply thinking skills not in ensuring the prescribed results of their thinking. Those who would constrain public teaching try to constrain public thinking. Continue reading
When Civics and Life Are Dissonant
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people can become fixated on wielding governmental power and forget the rights of the people. History is replete with leaders who twisted their popularity into a personal pedestal of perceived power. That is when humble and correct teaching is required to remind the next generation of voters that the right to lead is a responsibility not a privilege and the first responsibility of leadership is to guarantee the freedoms that have defined our nation. Continue reading
Theory into Practice: Feedback Feeds Teaching and Learning
Feedback is part of a teacher’s total instructional design. Once a teacher launches a lesson, the teacher is not an impartial observer. As a shepherd herds sheep toward home, a teacher uses feedback to ensure that all children reach their learning destination successfully. Every child engaged in the process of a lesson can profit from a teacher’s feedback, not just the lost sheep. Some feedback causes a child to succeed in the lesson and other feedback causes a child to really succeed – all children can use a teacher’s good feedback. Continue reading
Theory into Practice: Blooming the Curriculum with One Word – “So…”
Learning is an additive like train cars on a railroad line running through a classroom. Each car arrives with facts and skills to be taught and learned before it leaves the classroom/station, and the next train car of facts and skills arrives. There is more truth in this analogy that teachers want to admit. We change this perception with one word – “so.” All a teacher needs to do to move teaching and learning from a linear to a geometric design is to ask “So, what can/will/should you …” and teaching and learning launch vertically from children waiting for the next lesson to children doing higher orders of cognition with what they have already learned. It is blooming wonderfully! Continue reading
Theory into Practice – Behaviorism is a Good Teaching Method Until It Is Not
Teaching for learning is a purposeful and intentional process. When a teacher considers and selects the best teaching method for obtaining a wanted educational outcome for children, the teacher is exercising high professional problem solving and decision making. We all fall into the trap of grabbing familiar tools for the work at hand. A hammer is a hammer, but it is not the best tool for tightening a screw or creating a policy for resolving world hunger. Behaviorism, like a hammer, is the right tool for a small set of learning goals. It becomes the wrong tool when applied to all learning goals. Choose teaching tools wisely and keep each tool sharp. Continue reading
Theory to Practice: Teach for Retention or Forget Teaching It. Your Students Will.
Remembering what a teacher said is a struggle between working memory and brain dumping. If there is not an overt effort to retain what is heard, seen, or perceived, the working brain will dump what was heard, seen, or perceived within 30 seconds. That is a fact. A teacher who wants children to remember what they have been taught must know and practice principles of retention theory. If not, teaching is a wind that blows through children’s minds leaving little that was learned. Continue reading
Content Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Empathy Are Equal Teaching Skill Sets
Research and experience tell us that the single most essential quality children of all ages look for in their teachers is genuine care combined with trust of them as children and learners. Teacher empathy drives the “why” students engage in our curricular and pedagogical improvement strategies. We will not improve the data-based results until we attend to the human-based inputs. Continue reading