Restoring Meaning to Teaching
Deciding What Your Students Need to Learn
We rejoin the study group teachers who have now been meeting for more than a semester. The following are highlights from their dialogue about teaching and what is important for students to learn.
Maureen: I really enjoy teaching from March through May because the test monster is not coming to bite off our heads and tell us how horrible we all are. The kids can learn a few things that they will remember and be able to use later.
Beth: Last year, I was trying to do everything I thought I was supposed to. Now I am thinking more about what is important, I know more where my focus is. There is less stuff, but more time spent on the important topics.
Lisa: It is difficult, but I am trying to figure out what is important for me to teach and for them to learn.
Jess: In the first-grade meeting, we decided what was fluff in our curriculum and what was important and then took out the fluff.
Pat: I was trying to rush through so many things in the past years that I didn't have time to sit down with them and look at what they were writing or see if they'd got the meaning of the story. But now I've even started to throw away some of the topics and activities--you just can't cover everything.
Ellen: I have been one in the past who taught one unit for only one week. All this does is expose the student to a subject. It does not allow time to learn. I am not doing that anymore.
The teachers are becoming more reflective about their decision making, asking themselves, What do our students need to know? Most of us believe that students need more than facts, formulas, and vocabulary; they need a grasp of larger concepts, as well as skills that can help them work through problems on their own. But what are those big concepts? What do students need in order to understand those concepts? How do students learn the necessary skills? When do they learn them? How can we help students link what they have encountered and will encounter in other classes and at other grade levels? These are difficult but important questions, questions that help establish and maintain a focus on student learning.
Teaching decisions are often based on the textbook, available activities, or favorite topics without real consideration of the concept to be learned. Jess, a first-grade teacher in the group above, struggled with the question, Why do I teach bats? She was perplexed at first, but she did come to an answer--she wants her students to understand the characteristics that all mammals, including unusual ones like bats, have in common--and she redesigned her unit to make this purpose clearer. She still "teaches bats," but now focuses her entire unit on her real reason for teaching about bats.
Splintered Vision, a recent report on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study of instruction and student outcomes in a number of countries, concluded that, "Our [U.S.] curricula, textbooks, and teaching all are a mile wide and an inch deep" (Schmidt, McKnight, & Raizen, 1996). If you've had any exposure to recent reform ideas, you've no doubt heard the phrase, "less is more." This tricky but useful concept doesn't really mean that you do less in the classroom. Rather, you relinquish breadth of coverage for depth of coverage, introducing fewer topics, each of which is explored in greater depth and detail. Students investigate ideas and information in more meaningful ways, and teachers have time to discover what their students are actually understanding. After experimenting with this approach, one teacher told us,
"I'm coming to the idea that less really is more, but I am having difficulty in deciding where the less is."
Deciding where the less is--determining where to cut and where to go deeper--is not always a simple task. The state or national standards provide guidelines that may help us decide what is important for students to learn. However, many of us don't have the experience needed to use these documents in any way other than as a list of topics "to cover." By taking the time to explore the rationale behind the development of the standards with colleagues and being thoughtful about what is truly important for students to learn, our choices may become clearer.
Next Page: Pulling it Together
