Musings from the teacher's desk on a Friday afternoon

Well, here we are at the end of the week.  A rest is coming for most: for me it's a weekend of report card writing.  I'm never the guy who has the darn things in early.  I struggle at this time of every term.  I am always forced to evaluate my teaching as much as the students' learning.  I have made a conscious effort this term to try to move away from some of the traditional approaches to teaching - I say teaching, and not learning, on purpose.  If I think of what school still is for many intermediate and secondary grade students, it looks like this: the teacher has a bunch of stuff in her head, and she tries to replicate it in each of her students.  That often means that students are seen trying to memorize facts and figures and processes in order to repeat them successfully on "a test."  In my experience that approach makes it easy for the teacher to come up with a tidy letter grade at report card time (especially if there are lots of tests that have been averaged) but it's not a very useful measure of lasting learning and is not a very good way to promote higher thinking in students.  Success in this model comes easily for students who have the stick-with-it-ness to memorize the material, but it's not so good for those who don't (or worse, can't).

I have chosen to do things differently. For example, in socials I gave the students the topic (ancient Egypt) and they chose what question to ask and then decided not only how to answer it, but how to show their learning.  We had gained a background of Egypt not only by reading the text, but also by listening to podcasts, having PowerPoint supported discussions, gaining a bird's eye perspective via Google Earth and yes, taking some notes.  In English we practiced cursive writing (I'm more interested in their ability to read it than write it) and paragraph composition together while concurrently discussing topics for our outdoor trip. We also collectively read a novel, but chose a selection that was set in ancient Rome because some students might choose to investigate that ancient culture next.  Instead of answering a bunch of "comprehension" questions, we tried to synthesize each chapter down to a single concise statement.  In p.e. we went beyond the games of Term One and did a fitness test that measured strength, flexibility and cardio.  We discussed the long-term effects of fitness on our health and happiness.  In p.e, like most subjects, I took the students self-evaluations into consideration for their term marks because I find them to be quite accurate.  We have tried to look at things as they are in the world: connected.  So, in addition to "course work," we've watched some TED Talks, discussed their content and reflected on their meaning using the blog so that we can enhance our digital literacy while acknowledging our need to join the participatory culture.  In math we slowed down and really played with the numbers rather than trying to memorize algorithms and cramming for tests.  Ultimately we did do tests, but many students rewrote them until they were satisfied they had really mastered the content.  We will now harvest the fruits of that deeper learning as we move on to concepts that depend on a strong foundation in fractions and integers.  In all of this, the teaching and the learning have been at times messy.  This is a bit of a departure for me because I'm often described as a "structured" teacher.  However, I've decided to align my teaching closer to my philosophy.  I keep saying that creativity needs to be developed because we can't predict where the economy will be in the near future.  We need to ensure our students are flexible and able to bend to the demands of a dynamic world; we can no longer hope to "train" kids to have the tools necessary to be effective for what we don't know will be.  Thus, things like Joanna's wonderful art lessons and the students' own Egypt presentations are taking a bigger chunk of our time as I acknowledge that the students' learning needs to be more rounded, more holistic - less focused on "the three Rs."  And so, this weekend, I'll sift through their self evaluations, and their tests and their writing and my rubrics and try to come up with an accurate picture of all that has been achieved.  Wish me luck.