I’ve often been told that I’m a good teacher, which of course I appreciate greatly. But I’ve decided I need to do more anti-teaching a la Mike Wesch (you probably know him from this).
How about you? Anyone know of some good anti-teaching going on out there?
Students asking great questions? Learning for understanding? It may not happen as much as we’d like, but nonetheless, let’s celebrate our profession and call this teaching…not the opposite of. I ranted more on this in my own blog (no html comments allowed here to link to it).
I posted some thoughts on Dennis’ comment on his blog:
http://tinyurl.com/2hvs6k
Some attributes of “teacher”:
…rarely tells students what he thinks they ought to know: he believes that telling when used as a basic teaching strategy, deprives students of the excitement of doing their own finding and of the opportunity to increase their own power as learners.
…basic mode of discourse with students is questioning.
…generally does not accept a single statement as an answer to a question.
…encourages student to student interaction as opposed to student to teacher interaction, and generally he avoids being a mediator or judge of the quality of the ideas expressed.
…rarely summarizes the positions of students on the learnings that occur.
…lessons develop from the responses of students and not from a previously predetermined logical structure.
…generally, each lesson poses a problem for students.
…goal is to engage students in those activities that will produce knowledge: defining, questioning, observing, classifying, generalizing, verifying, applying.
…measures his success in the behavioral changes of his students: the frequency with which they ask questions, the cogency of their questions…
pete
(with attribution to Neil Postman
This is a great article. I am going to share this with our staff. Thanks for pointing it out to all of us.
“Some attributes of “teacher”:
…rarely tells students what he thinks they ought to know: he believes that telling when used as a basic teaching strategy, deprives students of the excitement of doing their own finding and of the opportunity to increase their own power as learners.”
Hmm, good and bad points for this one. Students do better with an objective, imho, but I guess allowing for open-ended answers rather than cookie cutter answers can still be done with an objective.
“…basic mode of discourse with students is questioning.
…generally does not accept a single statement as an answer to a question.
…encourages student to student interaction as opposed to student to teacher interaction, and generally he avoids being a mediator or judge of the quality of the ideas expressed.
…rarely summarizes the positions of students on the learnings that occur.”
Last part is what I have trouble with. ELLs tend to get lost sometimes, and that summarizing, or have a peer summarize helps them process information. Also repetition helps cement knowledge. No reason you couldn’t ask students/peers to summarize though.
“…lessons develop from the responses of students and not from a previously predetermined logical structure.
…generally, each lesson poses a problem for students.
…goal is to engage students in those activities that will produce knowledge: defining, questioning, observing, classifying, generalizing, verifying, applying.
…measures his success in the behavioral changes of his students: the frequency with which they ask questions, the cogency of their questions…”
I like this. What is frustrating now is that students are expected to answer questions with shades of meaning/understanding (analytical level on Bloom’s Taxonomy), but since it’s a multiple choice test for state testing, they are hemmed into ONE right answer to questions that could have more than one right answer. We’ve been doing a lot of students developing questions at my school, but much of it is geared towards test prep/test taking strategy, which s*cks (excuse my language).
Thanks, Scott for your comments on my post. The point is well-taken: the pedagogy and the fundamental shift in how a lesson or a course is presented is different than traditional methods. I just think that’s still called teaching. Or better yet, let’s just call it Good Teaching.
I’m all for that, Dennis.
Thank you for sharing this.
I’m inspired and believe we can create situations for students where they can think and question more deeply.
Sometimes I think we really ask so little of our students and they are capable of so much.
And the best part of this is that students are so much more engaged in their learning when we invite them to be.
Anti-Teaching
Mike Wesch and Scott McLeod recently posted about anti-teaching. Stepping away from lecture delivery systems and encouraging more student responsibility in learning. David Warlick talks about this often. Creating conversations.
I think of my o…