"How will I hold my students attention?"
"How can I make this comma-lesson fun and dynamic?"
While earnestly hoping the best for my students with this mindset, the questions I asked were fairly teacher-centered. They assume that a) the teacher holds the correct information and b) the teacher's job is to disseminate this information to the students. I planned my lesson this way because it is what I had seen other venerable teachers do at Whitman college.
A diagram of a teacher-centered classroom looks like this (lifted from Parker J. Palmer's The Courage to Teach):
Object: The class's subject (English, Math, Biology etc.)
Expert: The teacher
Amateur: The student
This framework expects the teacher to be an expert in their field; a specialist. It also expects students to come to class as patient and willing vessels, open to receive the good word i.e. there is nothing for them to do but listen.
Translate this into teen-speak = bored out of your gourd and texting your friends on your cell phone.
Passing twenty laptops to the students in my classroom creates an environment that looks much more like this:
The students are jazzed because there is something for them to do (information to be googled, pictures to arrange in a powerpoint, essays to edit) and they begin to feel class time is theirs to use.
Furthermore students are empowered. Instead of thinking "I don't know where commas go," they think, "I don't know the answer, but I know where to find it."
The student-led layout forces me to re-evaluate my roll as a teacher. I wonder: am I a fellow "knower" in a seat alongside other students? Am I a floating aid that roams around the room addressing questions? Am I the timekeeper, reminding them how much remains before the next activity? When they are all focused and working, do I just sit back and drink my tea?
As I sort through these questions daily one conclusion becomes obvious--student-led classes are more fun to teach. By placing students in direct contact with the material I relieve myself the onus of attempting to become a specialist of every SAT question, vocab word, sentence construction, novel, short-story, poem, and grammar rule we cover in this class (an impossible feat considering the slew of scholars who created entire careers on analysis of Homer's The Odyssey alone) and provides the space to address students individual needs.
We laugh a lot more during these types of classes.
6 comments:
Great first post. I really like the diagrams. Have you shown them to your students? I wonder how they would respond?
And your question about what is the teacher's job is a big one as technology and brain research provide big opportunities for educational reform. Thanks.
PS - I'll post a shout out to your blog on my blog:)
Gracias Laura.
Me encanta la oportunidad reflexionar tras los pensamientos de colegas tan dedicadas y impresionantes.
I love the idea of turning the "power" over to the kids. I have a great book called "Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen" which examines the Atlas Complex, which in effect is a fear of teacher types to relinquish control of the classroom. If everything is teacher directed whose learning is most important?
Great questions.
¡Qué buen comienzo a tu blog!
It is great to see how technology allows the students to be responsible for their own learning. If at times during class you feel like you're just sitting there doing nothing - you are! But as long as your students are on task, rest assured, there is learning going on!
Way to teach!
Wonderful post! I don't know that I've actually seen these representations of teacher- vs. student-led classrooms, but they make so much sense!
I think one of the things that really struck me, though, was the difference between the "object" and the "subject." To me, the teacher-led classroom not only assumes that the teacher holds the answers, but that there *are answers to be held by *anyone. In the student-led classroom diagram, I am amazed by the amount of pressure being exerted on the "subject," almost as if the group together has the ability to determine what the subject truly is, and what about it is important to learn.
In my English classes, I always tell my students that, no matter how many books we're going to read or refer to, their own writing and their own discussion are the true texts for the course. We will always learn more from one another in the classroom than we'll learn from an absent author. Or so it seems to me.
Thanks for the post on Slam Teaching, too! I'm definitely going to be watching your blog as it goes along. :)
Best,
Sean
Thank you for posting this information. I have also posted a shout out to you on my blog. :) I am relavitely new to the teaching field but the concept of student led learning really resonates with me. I learn so much from my students and I am not able to be an expert in all things because the information changes so rapidly these days. I teach technology and the students have a ton of relevant and helpful experience to add! I like the dynamic so much better in my class when the students are heavily involved in researching, teaching, reviewing and demonstrating.
Thanks for this post! I am relatively new to teaching but the concept of student led learning really resonates with me. I teach technology which changes rapidly and does not allow me to be "the expert". The students have a ton of relevant and very helpful information to add to the learning in the classroom. I agree with the comment about turning the "power" over to the kids and keeping the focus on the students by having them heavily involved in all aspects of the learning process. I look forward to conducting more research in this area and improving my teaching techniques to continually provide greater interaction and keep students responisble for their learning experience as well as giving them more opportunities to help their peers!
Post a Comment