"Do it this way or it's wrong."
This statement was clearly taken out of the guide on "How to be a bad teacher". Kids have their own ways of how to learn, so limiting them to just one way can be very detrimental.
"It tells them exactly what to do, or they couldn't do it."
This teacher must have been reading the same guide as the teacher that said the previous quote in my blog. To give up on students like this is setting them up for failure. Like Dr. Bogad says, if you think you're bad at math, you're going to be bad at math. Its the same thing here, only this was a science teacher.
"Decide what you think the best way is."
My faith in this article has been restored. Not all teachers in this read are bad. Giving kids this option is huge. Even if its wrong, this article will not say the answer but instead "Are you sure?" This is the proper teaching method and kids actually retain more information.
I found this article to be interesting but not very good and, to a certain extent, pointless. Sure it was great to read about different teachers and the different teaching styles but, as the author admits, this was a very limited study. Also her conclusion was there needs to be a lot more research. I wonder why she wrote this if she was just going to conclude this research wasn't good enough. Sure she brings up the "hidden curriculum" but it doesn't matter if it doesn't work on a larger scale than five schools. As you can probably tell, this was my least favorite reading so far.
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I agree that there are many ways to do things, but I think many teachers, especially nowadays, are taught the "decide what you think is best" approach way too much. I see is in my classroom, when the teacher often does not correct the students when they do things completely wrong. Whats the harm with telling the kid if they are writing their numbers wrong? I see no harm in telling them the right way to do it, and being very matter-fact-about it (I am not talking about yelling at them for doing it wrong or anything like that). Most of the time, the teacher seems to ignore such mistakes, but my opinion is that it does no harm to remind the kid the right way to write the number 7. I really do not think we are hurting their self esteem if we do that.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is one of my least favorite articles. And I also agree with Yana, the "decide what you think is best" method. It really doesn't work if everyone is off doing their own thing, it makes it hard to learn. There should be some sort of unified structure.
ReplyDeleteI feel too that there should be a more unified structure. There needs to be an in between "decide what you think is best" and keeping students from being creative at all. I feel like there are ways to tell students they are doing something wrong that would not hurt their self esteem.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point, what was the point of this article if she said her research was not good enough to prove her thesis? To me, she did not really prove her thesis at all - all she did was talk about different teaching methods in different 'social settings.' At the beginning of the article she said she was going to argue about how different social classes receive different educations - the higher your class, the better your education.
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