Teaching for Understanding
Students engage in a variety of thought-provoking activities such as explaining, finding evidence and examples, generalizing, applying, making analogies, and representing the topic in new ways. Teachers 1) make learning a long-term, thinking-centered process, 2) engage students in assessment for learning processes, 3) support learning with representations and conceptual models, 4) teach for learner differences 5) induct students into the discipline, and 6) teach for transfer. (Standards: 2.1, 2.3, 2.4)
I. Learning is a Long Term Thinking Centered Process
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Units of study always incorporate some kind of concept mapping component. Students not only read and analyze what they learned, they are to use higher order thinking skills to categorize major themes, draw connections between topics, and to put into their own words just what they have learned. Again and again, students are asked to come back to their concept maps to show that history is not just a linear random assortment of dates and facts, but is a complex study of relationships which are interrelated.
II. Engaging Students in the Assessment Process
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When students have a choice in the matter of their learning, they are more interested in the content, feel a personal connection to the material, and become an integral part of the class, not just a bystander. In my classes, students almost always get a say in the way they want to convey their understanding in major unit projects. For example, in the Industrial Era project, students are only given a list of areas which they must teach the class about and told they must complete a tic-tac-toe. The way students have gone about this was incredible- from groups re-creating radio technology with a science kit, re-enacting the daily life of a factory laborer, to them creating and interpreting charts and graphs with a traditional lecture format. A rubric of points helps guide them in this process, but again, students have the responsibility to guide their own learning.
III. Support Learning with Representations and Conceptual Models
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Interpreting charts, graphs, and models is something each student should be able to do throughout their lifelong social sciences learning experience. Beyond a simple venn- diagram, there are a slew of resources available for educators to provide this opportunity to students. For example, the "pyramid of hate" on the left is something I use in American Minorities to show how prejudicial attitudes, if left unchecked, can and historically have at times, evolved into the mass murder of millions. Then students are placed into groups and told to take apart, piece by piece, a historical instance where Genocide Occur. Covering all areas of the pyramids means students cannot just "google" the right answer. Instead they have to take in what they research, categorize it using the tool provided, and in the end they understand much better WHY and HOW something happened.
IV. Teaching for Learner Differences
No two people learn exactly the same, so how can a cookie-cutter approach succeed when it comes to educating students? It is my firm belief that a project infused, multiple-intelligences oriented classroom can reach more individuals than the dry lecture and "regurgitate the information" approach of classical education. Everyone can contribute to my classes, regardless of innate ability level, and modifications of the delivery of material allow for this to happen. Below is just one example of how a typical lesson plan can be modified to reach more students. Changing the lesson to an entertaining student team created skit, with all relative content remaining, means more students are able to participate meaningfully to class content.
V. Inducting Students into the Discipline
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Social sciences are best taught with experiential opportunities for students. In all of my courses, students are taught how to be a critical thinker. That means learning good research methodologies and how to properly cite sources. How to interpret political cartoons or quotes by people thousands of years gone. How to discern between reliable information and biased propaganda. These are but a few of the lifelong skills students develop and use daily in my classes. My goal is NOT to tell a student how to vote for example, but instead is to give them the critical thinking skills to be able to form their OWN opinion on a candidate and vote for themselves.
On left was a tool used by myself, Phil Schaeffer, and Todd Hornaday to practice with students critical reading and thinking skills on a
weekly basis using EDMODO. http://deizyk.wix.com/data
On left was a tool used by myself, Phil Schaeffer, and Todd Hornaday to practice with students critical reading and thinking skills on a
weekly basis using EDMODO. http://deizyk.wix.com/data
VI. Teaching for Transfer
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Too often, what is practiced in one lesson fails to carry over into other lessons. Students cannot really see the reason why they have to do meaningless worksheets that basically give Google-type answers. In my classes, there is a rhyme and reason for everything, not just for getting arbitrary "points" in the book. Everything builds upon everything else- for example, how the failure of the Articles of Confederation prompted the need for a strong US Constitution. Students need to learn one to understand the other. Here, one can see the thinking process behind curriculum for the Current Issues course I teach. The movie: Lost Boys is used as both an introduction to the course, and segues nicely to issues such as cultural diffusion, global economics, and human rights issues. Each subcategory interweaves with the next, so that students aren't just learning "chapter 1" or "page 45" but instead are learning things like why the Lost Boys of Sudan had to flee their country, what this says about human rights in Africa, and how America is spreading core democratic ideals sacred to her by taking in these refugees.