Good Learning isn’t Busy Teaching
(For a summary read the topic sentences of each paragraph - a 1-minute read)
??????????????????: Good learning is a furrowed brow. Good learning is a question steeped in thought. Good Learning is a quiet smile after the Eureka of understanding. And. Admittedly. These examples may have birthed from a disheveled, sleep-deprived altruist of a teacher steadily burning out whilst igniting sparks of curiosity. But equally...they may have occurred in the learner because they read in an article that bananas are berries, but strawberries aren't...
Sustained learning requires space for students to engage independently. Easier said than done when you have quite literally a captive audience. If you haven't engaged your learners in the study before providing the space, then that space most definitely will not host sustained learning. But independent engagement enhances a learner's ability to retain information and fosters a sense of responsibility and motivation. So spark curiosity. Your first responsibility as a teacher of your subject. Do this through role modeling your engagement in the subject, exemplifying curiosity through your interest in how your students think, and engaging in the genuine care of the life experience of your students. How we deliver our curriculum is as vital as what is in it.
Effective facilitation allows students to explore, struggle, and discover on their own. This doesn't mean that every lesson should be an inquiry-based one. The parameters of exploration can be both macro and micro. Maybe you're running a large PBL unit with a scope for students to select their own topics. Or maybe you've run a direct instruction on adding fractions but started the lesson with 5 minutes of students attempting the problem with insufficient knowledge. Whether macro or micro, a pedestal of ignorance must exist from which to observe their absence of knowledge. And the confidence of a guide to develop familiarity with the feeling and dispel the fear that so often prevails.
Incorporating EdTech can facilitate student-led learning, and amplify its outcomes. Herein lies the ability to tackle the busyness. It's not that we shouldn't be working hard, it's that we should be working more efficiently. Lots of us still manually marking short quizzes. Trying to keep up with an untenable exercise book feedback cycle that inevitably perpetuates insufficient feedback, just more consistently. Over-loading direct instruction lessons because we're frantically trying to cover the content of our course. In the room with us are sometimes upwards of 30 odd capable people often as invested in their learning as we are. EdTech allows us to teach them how to have agency in their learning, and it gives us ways to track whether student-led learning works.
The "gradual release of responsibility" model, which involves a transition from teacher-led instruction to student-led practice, is a great way to responsibly hand over the reins of learning to the learner. See resources below to get into this proper, but briefly: You begin with focused instruction i.e. direct explanation and examples of the topic, moving to guided instruction where you and the class tackle problems together and students can probe you through questions, evolving to collaborative learning where the class will tackle learning independently but with the teacher probes students through targeted questioning, finally achieving independent practice, where the teacher will focus support and questions on independent skills and tactics as opposed to subject specific concepts.
Good teaching isn't about being busy; it's about being effective in facilitating learning experiences that build autonomy and resilience in students. Doing this is a butt load of front-end investment. And so paradoxically could be considered busy...however, in this context, I dance with the term to impress upon you that by getting busy teaching we pay less attention to the learning—the cognitive effort that the learner must bear. You may furrow your eyebrows to resemble Jack Nicholson, but if your learners don't at least match that intensity, then teaching may be present but learning ain't.
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