The readings this week have been focusing on ways to encourage student thinking and learning. In chapter 8 of Bomer's "Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's Classroom", he talks about using purposeful conversation to help students learn.
His argument is that almost all learning is done through a communication of thoughts and ideas (whether it be a transmission or collaborative communication). As I was reading through this chapter I was thinking of the kind of communications I have seen or used in my classrooms, both as a student and as a teacher. There certainly was a lot of collaborative work done when I was a student. But I went to a more traditional school. From what I remember, a lot of what I learned was done in a lecture format. However, we would often have time to work together on in-class exercises and collaboratively learn there.
In my teaching classes, though, there seems to be an emphasis on more collaborative learning. While I will agree that I can be good, I have also seen instances where it completely backfires. It's very possible that you could end up with students teaching/talking about the wrong thing. If this happens, then it becomes very counter-productive. I believe, if anything, collaboration needs to be carefully monitored and teachers need to know when to step in. It can become very risky if you let someone learning a task go off and try to do that task on their own without any supervision. I'm just not sure how to manage such a task like that.
Chapter 9 focuses on using writing to generate thinking. Writing can be used as a way to help students think about thinking (metacognition), prepare for a discussion, enhance their reading, strengthen their skills in writing, and much more. The most difficult thing about this that I do not yet know is how to do is implement it into a classroom. I would like to do more writing exercises in the classroom I am interning at, but they begin every class with a 20 minute "books or blogs" activity. While here they are getting 20 minutes to do some kind of writing, I have noticed that a lot of my students don't use this time to read or write. With their smartphones they will get onto social media sites like facebook, twitter, etc. and use this 20 minute chunk of time in a way that probably wasn't intended to be used.
I believe that activities like this need to be focused as well... maybe I am worried about letting students have their own freedom (especially the younger students, for they seem to shirk responsibility). How do I implement these very new ideas into a classroom, especially classes that are not academically motivated? I want to have collaborative learning, and I want to teach students writing, but even when I try these suggested ideas in my own classes, I get maybe a 50% success rate...
I think its really good that you are thinking deeply on the effects of having students lead conversations. I, too, have seen students start to teach or discuss the wrong facts, or even steer the conversation in a totally different direction than the one intended. However, I see something positive in those situations as well: if you have a positive and aware moderator (the teacher) a lot of learning can take place with polite correction and redirection. Plus, when students turn the conversation, awesome things can come from that even if they are unexpected.
ReplyDeleteAs far as implementing good habits in the classroom, I don't have a direct answer for you, because I also have similar questions. But when I think about reading/writing workshops, I can see myself implementing these, but not until the class has a deep understanding of what is expected of them, and hopefully they will in turn see the value.