Helping Students Get to Where Ideas Can Find Them by Eleanor Duckworth - 0 views
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Susan Hersey on 09 Feb 14Duckworth says, "This journal issue is about helping students get their minds, their awareness, and their feelings so active and thoughtful and informed that they are in a place where hums-or connections, understandings, new ideas-can find them." It presents an ideal of curriculum development. The author acknowledges that teachers using this model know their curriculum extremely well and have a wide variety of learning materials and activities to engage their students. Readers can keep this ideal in mind as they develop their curriculum. Through examples, she shows us the importance of student led learning rather than teacher led learning. With their two-fold process, Duckworth and McKinney suggest that it is how teachers use their knowledge that make for a powerful way to help people learn. By carefully selecting aspects of the subject matter for student activities, and listening carefully and enthusiastically to the learners' ideas about the open-ended questions in those activities, teachers facilitate students to drive their own learning further. The challenge as teachers in this process is to be able to develop ways to keep students engaged to go deeper into the subject. Duckworth and McKinney note that, "we find that contributing our own ideas and thoughts about the subject matter almost always short-circuits the students' thoughts, and decreases their interest. But when we help them to take charge of their own explorations of subject matter, they do remarkable work." They acknowledge that this critical exploration method can be complex and challenging. The teacher needs to be "exceedingly present" in their teaching to be able to follow up on what their students are doing, saying, wondering about as they respond to activities with open-ended questions given by the teacher. With such a teaching approach, teachers have to be very aware of respecting the learners' thoughts and not steer them towards their own ideas when responding