This is the third of five essays over the next few weeks. The first two, Release Your Personality and Tap Their Spirits have been posted previously and can still be viewed on this blog. Collectively, the five essays in A Teacher’s Compass were born of my attempt to conceptualize in plain language the essential elements of exceptional teaching. They comprise my credo of teaching, my best advice to the novice and veteran teacher alike. (Each element is discussed more fully in a book I am writing; these essays here are short summaries of the elements.) As always, I encourage replies.
#3 Engage Their Minds. When all is said and done, this is the point of education. Nothing else really matters; if we fail at this, we fail – period. It is never enough to have students do, if what they are being asked to do is not accompanied by thinking. The litmus test must be what and how much students are learning at any given time in any given class.
We sometimes confuse the how with the what and how much:
• The how is comprised of the means by which learning is apt to occur.
• The what and how much are the ends, the actual learning.
When we confuse these, we find ourselves doing things that, while research supported and possible avenues for learning, may or may not be achieving the end result of significant student learning. For example, we put kids in cooperative work groups, assign time-consuming projects, or have them perform with manipulatives or other “hands-on” tasks even when the work groups may be dysfunctional, the projects may contain trace amounts of substantive content and the “hands-on” activities often have no benefit of being “minds-on” or have no connection in the students’ minds with the concepts they are supposed to be learning. There are countless examples of cases where we focus on the means – often because of administrative insistence – and forget all about what the students are actually learning, the true ends.
It would be wrong to suggest that these things never engage minds or impact real learning. It is to say that these strategies are not the goal in and of themselves and that we must not lose sight of the true goal. Done well, all of these things can cause a great deal of learning to occur.
Engaging their minds means putting content in relevant, student-meaningful contexts. It means exploring and exploiting their natural curiosities. It means pushing them to think about ideas, to grapple with various perspectives and solutions, asking “What if…?”, and doing so with rich, complex tasks that are very often messy and may well raise more questions than they answer. It’s hard work for them and for us. But the multiple choice questions they may face on state tests in May are no match for students who have basic knowledge and have been taught to think. Engage Their Minds. dven.
(to be continued…)
