A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days - a sobering lesson learne... - 56 views
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But students move almost never. And never is exhausting.
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Sharin Tebo on 19 Nov 14This was no different in my experience. There was not one class where I was asked to move to work with someone else. However, there was opportunity for engagement with others, where the teacher let the students do the talking and the working.
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sitting passively.
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build in a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day. Yes, we would sacrifice some content to do this – that’s fine.
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It was not just the sitting that was draining but that so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.
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This was not true for all my classes today when I shadowed. The teacher in one class served as a model to annotate an article while we did the same. We were left to our own devices to write the main idea in 2-3 sentences, too. We also had to sum up our learning by analyzing topics in some pretty tough questions in Physics, and the final question was to put it all together and list a real-world example. I thought this was clever.
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Early in my career, I also was asked to shadow students (when we were choosing schools for a funded project) and it was definitely one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had. I could not believe how resentful and angry I felt at the end of the day and I think of myself as someone who just loves to learn, but I did so little of it in most of the classes. After the experience, I was no longer surprised that students struggle to stay focused, and I redoubled my efforts to help support teaching and learning experiences that actively engage learners in building understanding. Highly recommend this experience for any teacher, coach or administrator.
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If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately: Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities
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set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done.
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Ask every class to start with students’ Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night’s reading or the previous class’s discussion.
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Teachers work hard