Saturday, April 11, 2009
Teaching Made Easy
Instead of making kids think deeply about questions about why teachers have been made to teach what. The reason the what is being taught is because the why is the most difficult thing for kids to comprehend. The what is also on standardized tests and that is the current policy dictating how schools get money. So teachers tell students what they want parroted back to them because that way no one has to think and students can answer the questions on the exam they have to take at the end of their time in high school. We are killing critical thinking in the middle school and high school with this kind of teaching. We need to stop teaching to an exam and teach kids how to think for themselves, how to gather information without giving them long research papers. But to teach them how to discern information themselves from the text books we make them read. We can do it by giving them more outside literature so that by the end of their time spent in our classrooms they are not "parrot smart" but can actually think for themselves. It is our job to give these kids the tools that they need in the real world, and having kids repeat what the teacher just said is not the way to prepare anyone for anything.
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I agree with you completely. I think the PBL article reflects this really well. Problem based learning seems to not only encourage the "why" in addition to the "what" but also provoke students into discovering the "why" largely on their own while enjoying the process.
ReplyDeleteI like your comment about "parrot smart". That seems to be exactly what is going on in some cases. It is hard to avoid this though when the tests and scores are so important to the success of the school. Not that a teacher should not test the students, but how challenging do you want top make a test that has many implications including job stability? It is sad to say but I have experienced teaching to the test, and it goes both ways for me. I have a hard time teaching the class as parrots, but results are hard to come by elsewhere. To the credit of the tests, they do seem to be more closely related to the content thatn when I remember taking these types of standardized tests.
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