How many times do we say to ourselves or our colleagues, “I’ll fix that”? When something is not going the way we want, the desire is to “fix” it. Sometimes we allow the “fix it” mentality to begin to apply to ourselves or co-workers. We start to think that it is the teacher that needs fixing. The truth is that we don’t need to fix teachers because they are not broken! In fact, nothing is “broken”. It only needs adjusting and refining.
When faced with new ways of doing things as educators, we often feel that if we are changing what we have been doing, what we were doing must have been wrong. While in rare cases that might be true, most of the time that assumption is completely wrong! What we are doing may work with many or even most students, but as educators we are always looking for ways to refine what we do with the goal of reaching ALL students with a deeper level of understanding. Sometimes accomplishing this can be as simple as taking materials and resources that we already have and using them in different ways. Let’s look at an example.
A teacher has used a reading passage in the past to have students learn a history concept and has followed the reading with a worksheet of questions for students to write answers pertaining to the content of the passage. While many students may have been compliant and completed the work, there were some who did not complete it and even many who answered the questions did so in a cursory way, not getting any deep knowledge or understanding of the content. The teacher, realizing this, may feel that this lesson is “broken” and needs to be completely abandoned and may even take it as a personal failure. The alternative to the teacher is to re-design an entire lesson and all its activities, a process that seems overwhelming to the teacher. could this lesson be simply refined? Yes! What if the same questions were simply divided up amoung student groups with each group getting a couple of questions. Students in the groups would then be asked to answer the questions and discuss them with each other until a group consensus could be achieved. These answers could then be the basis for a large group discussion, a presentation or to have students teach other groups. This process did not require the teacher to find new resources but allowed the teacher to use the same resource in a different and hopefully more successful way.
One common direct teach technique is to use presentation software to display slides and points in a visual way while discussing content. Most teachers prepare these slides with a title representing the slide’s topic at the top of each slide. A very effective way to use this content can be as simple as showing students the title of the slide, filling in necessary background information and asking students to research and talk about the topic of the slide’s title. Often students will come up with the same information that is on the rest of the slide but in greater detail. At the conclusion of the discussion the teacher can display the slide’s points, show the pictures, play videos, etc. as a way of reinforcing or filling in any gaps that discussion and research failed to find. Students’ depth of knowledge on the topic almost always increases with this method. The teacher has no additional preparation but students learn more!
As a secondary math teacher, I once believed that more practice and repetition was better but over time, I realized that repetition without understanding was getting students nowhere. I took the same problems, broke them into pieces and gave students or groups of students different problems to solve and asked them to explain to the whole group or each other how they reached the solution. This proved far more effective in getting students to retain the content. All of which took no more effort than simply deciding how to split up the problems.
When students don’t learn, that doesn’t mean the teacher or even the resources are a failure. Often times the solution is simply changing the way that we are using resources. We don’t fix teachers, we fix the problem!