I'm sure there's a 12 step program somewhere to break my habit, but I'd be too lost in researching the pedagogy behind the program. I LOVE reading about what other schools do to be successful and seeing how I can apply their success strategies to what's happening on my own campus and in Stout Nation.
The December 2016/January 2017 issue of Educational Leadership has an article titled Getting Schools Ready for the World by Will Richardson. Richardson uses several sources to craft together an article about how advances in telecommunication technology are changing the landscape of news reports, U.S. Congressional work, and police department transparency. Richardson uses the example of the popular game Minecraft to explain how students are ready to learn through what many teachers call new ideas, but that schools aren't ready to deliver instruction in a way that allows for students learning dispositions to develop. In fact, the current way we teach and run our lessons might actually be discouraging the still-developing contemporary learning dispositions.
Here's what made my mind really start to marinate on the information in Richardson's piece: he cited Gopnick's (2016) opinion piece explanation of what happens to students during explicit instruction. Explicit instruction from a parent or a teacher (as in, "this is how you should think about about what you're going to do") limits the thinking ability of a student. Instead of creating their own thinking pathway, the student begins to copy the thinking of the teacher/parent.
I immediately thought about the lesson that I'm currently teaching to my 4th and 5th graders. We're doing a review/reteach of absolute pitch and using Jingle Bells to make it be fun and applicable to their real worlds. The students work through absolute pitch and then can figure out the song using an Orff instrument. There are many more components to the lesson, but that's a quick overview. I compared the explicit instruction described in this article to what was planned in my lesson and I had one of those sinking bottom of the pit stomach moments where I feared that I wasn't giving my students enough of a chance to do the thinking on their own.
I didn't want to do that to them! I want Stout Nation to develop critical thinkers who work hard at developing skills for their future.
I read this article yesterday evening, and I vowed to pay attention to what my students were doing in today's lessons.
Well, I'm thrilled to report that I was pleasantly surprised! I had critical thinking in my lesson and didn't even realize it. While a very small part of my lesson was using explicit instruction, a very large part of the lesson allowed the students to do all the thinking and instruction to themselves or with a partner. I feel like I hit the jackpot was watching my students work through this lesson!
I'm glad I read this article because it's going to give me a chance to work until Winter Break to make sure that what's happening in my class isn't all explicit instruction. In fact, I'd like to reduce that as much as possible and only do it when absolutely necessary. That's probably an entirely different Educational Leadership article in itself!
Gopnik, A. (2016, July 30). What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages. Retrieved November 29, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/opinion/sunday/what-babies-know-about-physics-and-foreign-languages.html?_r=0
Richardson, W. (2016, December 1). Getting schools ready for the world. Educational Leadership, 74(4), 24-29.