After reading the article "A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned" posted by Grant Wiggins (2014) I feel do lucky and so sad for other teachers and students around the country. In her first take away, the author of "A Veteran teacher" (2014) mentions that "students move almost never. And never is exhausting" (Key Takeaway #1, para. 2), which is depressing because at my school we are encouraged to take brain breaks every 30 minutes in order to have the students get energize about our lessons. One thing we do a lot is have students stand up and do dance revolution videos on Youtube. Another teacher has his students do jumping jacks just like the author of "A Veteran teacher" (2014) mentions in the article. In the upper grades, we constantly have students sitting outside using their chrome books working on their projects so they can get some sunlight. When I taught, I constantly had my students stand up to walk around for 10 seconds every 30-40 min and talk to a partner, beyond all the think pair share (tps) we do as well as many total physical response (tor).
On the second takeaway, the author of "A Veteran teacher" (2014) mentions that students listen for about 90% of their time in class. Once again this is not the norm at our school. Last year we noticed this as an admin team and what we decided to do is to set a standard a a school of how much a teacher needed to talk and how much a student needed to talk. We called this student talk vs teacher talk, we did several rounds of peer observations and in the end we were able to not only achieve the goal but maintain the goal of having students talk for about 70% of the class period. In order to accomplish this, we as teachers had to give up some control and provide depth of knowledge questions that would encourage our students to discuss. Additionally, we set up our classrooms with Partner A and B as well as table groups so students had someone to always talk to when we asked a question. As a result of this our CELDT scores have gone up in the last two years and we are now focusing on reading time across the school. After reading this article now I know that I am very lucky to have a school like mine were innovation and challenges are addressed. Reference: (undefined, October 2014). A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days - a sobering lesson learned. Granted, and.... Retrieved June 21, 2015, from https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/
1 Comment
6/21/2015 02:28:30 pm
I love the idea of "brain breaks," especially knowing that it is a schoolwide effort. All the steps you're taking along with the acknowledgment of time, you're seeing the results. This is all evidence of the importance of allowing students to be active participants of their learning.
Reply
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm Mr. D and I have been teaching technology for a better part of 12 years. Welcome to my blog! ArchivesCategories |