Letting Go

What does teaching really mean to you in school?

Teaching in my point of view is giving educational experiences to children where they can learn how or why something happens and APPLY it to their lives and real world experiences. So many view education as something that you learn to solve or memorize facts. Some situations may call for ideas such as that, but the base line for education is to provide students with life long skills that they can use in their future careers and lives down the road. This means that teachers need to focus on relating the information taught to real life situations that would be beneficial to students. This also allows them to inquire how to implement strategies learned  in different situations. 

The students role is to utilize their prior knowledge of the skill that was learned and implement it in the current situation. Lastly, the student must be able to assess the effectiveness of that implementation and understand the effects of it. This allows for more prompt for students decision-making and independence throughout their courses. Wiggins states, "By high school, Socratic Seminar, Problem Based Learning, and independent research ought to be the norm not the exception: you have no hope for success in college or the workplace without such independence."  This means that when teacher scaffold and do not relinquish the responsibility to the students, they stumble over situations that require them to use inquiry thinking skills. 

As a reading teacher I am guilty of using close reading strategies with my students daily. Each day I use those strategies aloud with the students and the students also use them independently. However, I do not restrict their reading strategies to just one set of skills that cannot apply to other readings or use only one skill for all students. The close reading strategies allow the students to determine their need for any of those strategies to help them better comprehend the passage. Also, it allows them the opportunity to chose which or how many strategies they need in order to be successful in comprehending the passage. 

In order to make my lessons more scrimmage-like, I could allow the students to use their prior knowledge of the close reading strategies to help them with their reading comprehension. I would circulate the room in order get an idea of the most reoccurring strategy used and the effectiveness of the strategy with each students. Then, after the students have had time to read their passages and use their strategy, the students will take turns sharing any struggles they had within the passage and which reading strategy they used in order to help them overcome it. This requires the students to use skills they have learned to inquire about what skill would be more beneficial to their learning outcome. This gives them independence. Afterwards, the students would share their strategies and outcomes with the class on the Smartboard.