I dare to say that this quotation perfectly represents what the aim of education should be: The challenge of teaching understanding is largely the challenge of making the big ideas in the field become big in the mind of the learner. (p. 75). When we think about our reality, our own educational Chilean reality, first of all I see reflected the opposite in most of our actions, in our classes, and I include myself too. I guess if one pays attention to our own classes, we we’ll discover that we’re “sinners”, since we only make lessons to favour content and the aimless coverage as mentioned in the text. I think that we’re not prepared for this. So far for us this is a big issue, as mentioned at some point in the text (regarding standards) that we have too many expectations to achieve that eventually what we only obtain is this so called overload problem; besides, what we end up doing is “covering” them, how? with content, obviously. Where the problem lies in my opinion is on one specific point that is the spinal of a lesson, the lesson plan. If somebody, say, an expert, (or just simply a conscious teacher!), devotes his/her time to GUIDE (not lecture) a proper lesson on how to include all these marvellous points about understanding, big ideas and essential questions and so on, well, I guess the story and this discussion would be different. I’m sure that most of us were left stranded to do whatever we could to obtain the passing mark, as I did in my planning course. One of the problems that affect teachers is that even having well established goals in our curriculum, we still are not able to carry them out, because we’re not skilful enough to turn this goals into a planning that encourages understanding. The counterpart might be that we’re meant to be autonomous, but let’s face it, we’re not, and something must be done to fix this huge intellectual gap. We belong to a generation (a badly planned one), which has been fated to follow the herd and teach content, (I hope that you, dear classmate-reader, don’t belong to that group, probably you don't), and to reverse this problem will take long time until the enlightened ones come to fill those visible cracks we have in our classrooms. So, issues like essential questions, big ideas, core tasks and so forth are not really feasible for most of the current teachers, probably for future generations, they will be.
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9 comments:
Hi Claudio,
I think all of us have sinned at least once during our careers,all of us have felt tired, worried about our own lives or just absent minded during class. And that is a thing this chapter do not takes into account."the human factor" regarding teachers. We have to be psychologists, sociologists, clawns, magicians, police officers sometimes AND teachers. I wonder if engineers have to deal with all that stuff when working.....
I still haven't read any book dealing with this issue.So the next time you find yourself sinning...don't worry , we are as human as students...
XOXO
Vicky
Hi Claudio
I completely agree with you when you said we are “sinners”, which unfortunately I think it is true. As teachers we are always running from one job to another and timing is not our best friend. Also we are always pressed by the time regarding the contents of a course because we are supposed to “cover” all the contents included in a specific textbook or planning. But Is this rush worth to be done? Because if it is so, we have to consider a crucial question which involves all the participants in the process of teaching/learning: “Are our students the victims in this process as they receive education in a hurry which is worried to cover only contents and not to teach properly considering “the” main aim of teaching, i.e. “real understanding” from the learners?” Good point dear friend.
Claudio:
The challenge of teaching understanding is very complex. There are several factors which hinder teachers from doing so. Parents’ expectation is one of the most important factors. It seems that they are not prepared to face this kind of approach. This is reflected when they feel disappointed because their children do not use the textbook all the time or their copybooks are not full enough. According to them, teachers are not doing a good job. What their children learn is not important. What is worse, they consider marks as the only proof of their children’s understanding. However, marks do not always reflect the understanding of students.
Dearest,
I completely agree that our basis on lesson planning in the undegraduate level was very poor and absolutely not coherent with what we were expected to do.
And those beautiful lesson plans we had to do when doing the teaching practicum were never done again, as they should be, with the timing, objectives for every single activity...which the biggest sin of all, because of time constrains.
However, I think it is not that we are bad teachers because of that. Commitment is a key word that comes up in this issue, and I am sure that classroom experience allows us to plan good quality lessons which lead to good students' performance.
How can we sort this problem out? I think it is devoting more effort to what we give our students, and obviously, give your best in the classroom with a purpose at the end of the day which students meet. It is quality vs. quantity... with a proper range of contents that may be covered using self studying strategies,and doing a follow up in order to assure their learning.
We are "sinners", I agree with you.
I think that most of us believe it is already a hard task to cover content, to plan a good lesson, to motivate students,to corret tests, and so on.
Could you imagine how difficult it would be to start thinking about making essential questions and big ideas??????????
Probably the first idea that comes to our minds is "I've got a lot of job to do and don't have any time to think about essential questions and big ideas." And even sometimes we may think "Why should I do this? Do my students really deserve all my effort?"
My answer would be yes, they do deserve our effort and we also deserve the opportunity to improve our lesson plan, because as you well mentioned the problem lies at this point.
I think it would be a very good initiative to start litle by litle including big ideas in our lesson plan to encourage understanding, since at the end of the day it will facilitates our job.
As you sated, our pedagogical practices have been bad focused since we don’t have clear what is our mission in the current system of education. The confusion is present at the very beginning of our academic formation, because it does not point to the development of the intellectual skills that any students have. The misunderstood of concepts such as learning, knowledge and understanding, is leading us to conceive our task as superficial transmitters of knowledge what does not help to students to go beyond the information given therefore if we want to promote these kind of abilities in the classroom we will have to change the way in which contents are checked nowadays.
Claudio,
I totally agree with you in the sense that everything sounds so easy and feasible to carry out in our teaching but as you mentioned many factors are not taken into account. Paper can support almost everything but in practice things are very different. It’s a fact that planning seems to be the key , but are we focusing on understanding; moreover, are we performing pro understanding?” If somebody, say, an expert, (or just simply a conscious teacher!), devotes his/her time to GUIDE (not lecture) a proper lesson on how to include all these marvellous points about understanding, big ideas and essential questions and so on, well, I guess the story and this discussion would be different”. Undoubtedly, but meanwhile, let’s think positively, we are gaining awareness in order to take action.
Hi Sunshine!
I completely agree on what you posted. There are important "cracks" in our classrooms and in our Chilean educatinal context that need fixing urgently. But as you said, action must be taken from all the points and angles. Teachers working at schools are not the only ones in whose hands is the responsibility, what is happening or isn't happening at the level of universities where new generations of teachers are being trained without the necessary skills to face the new challenges in education. I'm afraid I belong to that generation that grew up with fear and was taught to follow the herd; however, one can escape their context and do things in a different way.
Hey workaholic:
I do not belong to the generation of fear... But I must confess I follow the herd. However, this is like alcoholism; the first step to give is to recognize you have a problem. Then we, a bunch of alcoholics decided to take an M.A. programme to stop being doomed to follow the herds. It is difficult, but as the article mentions, it is a long-term process. At this very moment, we are just refusing drinking from the bottle of that bitter elixir that makes us sinners who, as a result, are not autonomous and live in fear. Eventually, If we work hard against our own teaching beliefs and our own teaching practices, someday, we will be able to rejoice in the bottle of critical thinking. You said the other day your education was poor. Well, mine was too... But we are trying to change that.
Good bye... "Sunshine"
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