Posts Tagged ‘teachers’
What makes great teachers?
Posted on: October 14, 2012
According to one researcher’s book, they:
- Leave no learner behind
- Are reflexive
- Set high goals
Grade less, learn more
Posted on: June 21, 2012
Walking about in a mall, I saw a promotion to Pay Less, Taste More. Our Ministry of Education advocates Teach Less, Learn More.
After reading these three articles and reflections, I think we could and should Grade Less, Learn More.
- You Should Probably Just Grade Less
- Instead of Standardized Tests, Why Not Build the World Wide Web?
- My own archived blog entry Question The Model
The first piece by Bud the Teacher started the ball rolling . In his own words:
For starters, I think teachers, in general, grade too many things. So one way to streamline would be to “grade” less. And that doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t ask students to write, and write often. But we don’t need to grade everything that comes to us. In fact, we should grade very little of it.
In the context of writing, Bud went on to say that teachers have built up the wrong expectations that they are their students’ only audience and that they alone evaluate what that writing is worth.
He argued that technology should not be the means of streamlining grading when the problem lay with the assumptions, design, and expectations of grading.
Put another way, the questions he might have asked could include: Why are students writing for just one person? Why not leverage on authentic and public writing spheres? Why not approach the task as a fellow reader and learner in order to critique instead of just grade?
Cathy Davidson wrote the second article and she was as thought-provoking as always.
She started by describing seven reasons why standardized testing, while great for grading, are not that great for evaluating learning. So she suggested a key alternative: Get learners to create by learning how to code.
I do not think that all learners need to code, but I do think that all learners need to be given the freedom and opportunity to express themselves and to create. Only then are they putting theory into practice. Only then are they making mistakes. Only then are they really trying.
As a result of reading these and other articles, I had to ask myself if I had reflected on these issues before. I had in the third piece.
Two years ago, I had concluded that modernizing a problem (e.g., creating grading software) was not the solution. We might create more intelligent systems, but the problem of testing irrelevant skills in irrelevant ways would still remain.
No, the solution lies in questioning the established but problematic model. It starts with accepting that grading more sometimes leads to learning less.
Grading takes time and students do not get timely feedback. Students do not pick up as much content or as many skills as teachers wish. Teachers do all they can to keep up with the grading load and do not have the bandwidth to learn new strategies.
A solution might lie in figuring out how to grade less so that everyone learns more. By grading less I do not mean asking for lazier teachers. We need teachers who question, learn, and act on what they realize is better for their learners.
Teachers could grade less by redesigning tests and focusing on key things that need grading. They could leverage on their learners’ need to communicate, create, and critique. Teachers could model these life skills and teach their students to peer assess in authentic environments.
As they do this, I bet they would learn more about what their learners are capable of and what new value they as teachers bring to the table.
Stop nannying our teachers
Posted on: October 25, 2011
We should stop nannying our teachers. That was my conclusion after a conversation I had with a few of my colleagues as we side-tracked during a research meeting. How did we get there?
We were talking about our case studies of beginning teachers and how their teaching philosophies and perspectives influenced their degree of technology integration.
A preservice teacher is typically more enthusiastic about creating their own online resources. An inservice teacher would rather depend on vetted resources and repositories like edumall 2.0, AskNLearn or Lead.com.
An inservice teacher faces the practical realities of chasing a curriculum, managing parental expectations and tending to their charges. Given these circumstances, it might seem forgivable that most take the convenient route. But surely there must be something else behind this mindset.
I think we enable this mentality because we nanny them. We provide them with ready-made, quality-assured or otherwise vetted content. We also get most to use an LMS where they have limited authorship and certainly no administrative rights. Then we don’t always model how to find and create our own resources.
So why I am against nannying teachers from the moment they join us in NIE?
Nannying student teachers suffers similar ills to to hands-off parenting. You transmit the wrong values e.g., resources will be prepared for you or I will tell you what to use or what to do.
The nanny is not empowered or empowering. The nanny feeds the symptoms (I need ideas or resources) but does not deal with the real issues (I need to learn how to think on my own and create, or co-create, these resources).
We need nannies like we need someone to carry child’s bag from gate to car. The child needs to pack and carry his or her own bag.
How/Why teachers use Twitter
Posted on: November 8, 2009
Video source
At the 4min 36sec mark, the facilitator asks the panel, “What does it mean to tweet about education?”
The panel answers this question and goes on to describe the power of education in personal learning networks (PLNs).
Think and act as teachers
Posted on: September 23, 2009
One of the things I tell my teacher trainees at the beginning of the semester is to “think and act as teachers, not as students”.
NIE calls them student teachers, but I think too many see themselves as the former rather than the latter. The rest of the world might label them preservice teachers but this is not accurate because practically all teachers-to-be in Singapore have some teaching experience. So I call them teacher trainees even though I don’t like the idea of “training” them.
They are teachers-in-training and they should think and act like teachers. Except maybe this one time…
I was facilitating a class in a computer laboratory when I noticed a group debating something. The group eventually got my attention and asked me if there was a difference between constructivism and constructionism. They thought like conventional teachers when faced with a question they could not answer: Ask an expert.
There is nothing wrong with that but if they had thought like today’s students, they would have just Googled it or looked it up in Wikipedia. After all, we were in a computer laboratory and they had the world’s libraries and expertise at their fingertips. I told them to search and they did.
Perhaps I should tell them to think like digital immigrants who are fully conversant and immersed in digital native language and culture. Is there a short way to say this?
