Implementation in an Elementary Classroom (Articles) - 0 views
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unlearning
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erinlullmann on 27 Feb 21This might be the "term of the course" as a lot of personalized learning is unlearning for teachers as well as students. This even applies to my job as a coach / PD presenter. Traditional professional development is a lot of "sit and get." Sometimes this is due to time and sometimes this is due to just doing what we know and we have been taught. I need to remember to "unlearn" my traditional teaching tendencies and move out of the box to try more of a personalized or inquiry based approach.
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when she answers students’ questions straightforwardly instead of asking questions to help the students find the answers themselves, she’s actually interfering with the learning process.
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This makes me think of Michael Bungay Stanier and what he refers to as "The Advice Monster." This applies to so many situations from working with students, to coaching teachers, to talking to your spouse. It is not a natural reaction to turn a question back around on the questioner, but often times the student/teacher/spouse knows the answer. They just need to work through the process of finding it themselves. And it is SO much better when they discover it themselves than when someone else tells them what to do or what the answer is or how to solve the problem. Here's his Ted Talk on the advice monster if you're interested (he's a pretty great presenter): https://youtu.be/Kl0rmx7aa0w
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students to discover fundamental principles on their own.
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Thinking Maps, she continues, introduce students to the notion of thinking about thinking — of conceptualizing the thought process objectively,
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In traditional schooling the teacher does the thinking for the student. When we turn the thinking over to the student, we have to reteach teach them how to be a learner (depending on how long we've had them in a traditional school system). What does it mean to be a learner? What does it mean to be a thinker? What does your thinking look like?
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helping children gain active control over the process of thinking so they learn how to learn,
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It's messy. It's unstructured. It's hard to plan for. It takes a leap of faith on the teacher's part to try this - to turn the learning over to the students. This would be a great time to invite an instructional coach in to your classroom to work with you. I'm sure that when starting any level of more personalized / inquiry based learning with students, it will be messy. Teachers will want to give up, quit, and go back to the old way. Working with a coach would be beneficial because you have someone in the trenches to help you, encourage you, trouble shoot with you, and help you focus on the end goal all while reminding you about the small victories that occurred each lesson.
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Giving them directions all the time takes away from the creative process and imagination, which a lot of my kids are lacking,” she says, “because they’re so used to being spoon-fed information that they can barely critically think.”
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Play is, after all, the way children are wired to learn, especially in the preschool and kindergarten years. Most teachers know the classroom is the perfect place for children to play, but opportunities to provide those benefits are on the decline.
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The kindergarten teachers in my building strongly advocate for their Discovery Centers time each day, which is essentially play time. The only allot 20 minutes or so each day for this but other admin in the district discourage their teachers from doing this as that time should go toward academic learning. The teachers in my building have to almost keep this time of their day on the "down low" with other K teachers in the district because not everyone agrees that it is a good use of time.
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"How?" The short answer is: one step at a time.