The Work of Teaching
What are the disciplinary needs of adolescents? We have many tools available to us to figure this out. However it is still not easy to do because of the nature of our diverse and ever-changing clientele. First as teachers, we should get to know our students, personally and academically. We need to build personal relationships with them to find out what they are interested in and what their “funds of knowledge” are. “It requires that we listen to their voices so that we can respectfully and individually guide them toward their destinations”(Gutzmer & Wilder, 2012). We also need to look at prior performance, such as scores on state and district tests as well as grades from previous years. Most importantly, we need to implement our own pre-assessments in the classroom in order to identify gaps in learning. From there we have state standards to guide us in what material should be covered. However, we as teachers need to have a strong content knowledge and understanding of the “Big Ideas” and habits of mind that are critical to success in our disciplines.
Relying on cognitive dissonance as an internal motivator, we must allow students to explore and discover important concepts on their own. We will need to have identified and noted what evidence of learning we will be assessing for while they are working on the tasks and have thought about and possibly documented guiding questions to help them develop disciplinary habits of mind and guide them towards discovery without just telling them they are wrong or giving them the answer. “Resolving errors requires a complex set of interactions between students and teachers, with the goal of ensuring that students experience success in their learning endeavors”(Fisher, Fray, & Lapp, 2010). Once we are sure that the students have obtained deep conceptual understanding, we will need to scaffold the literacy of the discipline so that they can effectively communicate their thinking processes, understandings, and discoveries with others.
After our lessons, we need to take time to look back on the lesson and identify areas that worked well and areas that may need adjustments in the future. For example, “Were did my students get stuck?”, “What were the common misconceptions?”.
Frey, N., & Fisher, D. (2010). Motivation requires a meaningful task. NCTE, (September).
Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2010). Responding when students don’t get it. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(1), September.
Gutzmer, C., & Wilder, P. (2012). “Writing so people can hear me”: Responsive teaching in a middle school poetry unit. Voices From the Middle, 19(3), march.
Mathematical Music, youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-r7_G-SUAo
McTighe, J., Seif, E., & Wiggins, G. (2004). You Can Teach for Meaning. Educational Leadership, 62(1), september.
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