To be completely honest, as I was reading this book I often found myself lost. I took everything I read very literally, and I couldn’t truly figure out why we were reading it. As a read, the things that stuck with me were that we need to teach kids skills, not activities; We need to teach how to think, not what to think; And that students should be learning what they live and living what they learn. When I went to class I was not sure if I had found the meaning or purpose of this book. Through discussion, I learned that my takeaways were correct and that I could have dug a little deeper.
Saber Tooth Curriculum is about how times and needs change and we need to change our teaching. We should not continue using outdated practices as the world is evolving. We need to keep our teaching relevant to the times. We all are able to point out flaws in the education system, and it often stems from who is at the top. We need to look at how people are moving up the ladder and consider who updates what is taught. If the person updating the curriculum hasn’t been in a classroom for 15 years, do we really think they are the best person to be UPDATING how we teach?? If the person at the top of the food chain has never stepped foot in a classroom, do we really think they should be in charge of telling us HOW to teach??
…..NO!
Teachers need to be the designers in their classrooms, not people who don’t know what the 2019 classroom looks like. However, teachers do need to take a step back from their practice from time to time to see the needs of their students and tailor the learning to them. Teachers “know things the community needs to have done, and have the energy and will to do them” (Peddiwell, 1939, p. 25). This makes us DESIGNERS! Learning cannot be unreal and artificial. As teachers we need to provide students opportunities to LEARN what they LIVE, and LIVE what they LEARN; providing authentic problems for students. The Saber Tooth Curriculum allows teachers to see that they need to keep their practice current and relevant, otherwise we will become irrelevant.
Your honestly at the beginning of your post was great as I think I feel into that category quite a bit during the reading. I kept trying to figure out what part of educational practice they were talking about. But overall after the discussion in class I too felt that I did have some grasp on what we read. You point out the need to teach skills and not activities and what I feel is the most important how to think. That skill is sometimes a pretty hard task for teachers to do - how to teach how to think. As we think of being designers I believe we will also create better lessons to help our students think more critically. Too much of our focus has been on the right answer which I believe has been a real problem in giving our students the opportunities to really think about a problem.
ReplyDeleteI too got lost in the middle of the book (credits, etc) and I kept thinking "I'm sure this is some historical part of the development of education I'm forgetting!" Oh well...I just kept reading.
ReplyDeleteI'm behind you when you said we need to teach them how to think. But what I started to think about how little in comparison I was asked to know growing up, but here I am as a pretty good problem solver. I can think critically; I have good communication skills, and I'm a decent collaborator (by far my worst quality though). Is this possibly because there was less I was held accountable for knowledge-wise? Or was it due to my upbringing and watching my parents solve problems? (They are horrible communicators!) I'm just wondering if it's so hard to teach kids to think because we're jamming too much into their brains that they can't make meaning out of it all? Thoughts?
I read the book two times and was able to understand the things that stuck with me, too. I agree with you that we need to teach students to think and make our lessons relevant by keeping our practice current. I do think that some of the old-school ideas still work and we don't always have to reinvent the wheel as they say. An example is the Lucy Caulkins reading and writing programs we are required to use at my school. There are some great lessons but there is no hint of guided reading which I think is and important practice especially with the lower level readers in the classroom. I do believe students need to problem solve and think critically. Today in second grade I gave the performance task for even and odd numbers and it proved to be pretty challenging. I had the students work together and most of the groups were able to use their thinking to solve the problem. I will give another performance task tomorrow of similar nature to see who grasped the even/odd number standard.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with your statement about taking a step back and tailoring students needs otherwise know as differentiation. I taught a reading/science lesson on the monarch caterpillar and tailored the lesson to meet my student's needs at this time.
I agree that there is too much outsourcing of education ideas to people that have little to no classroom experience: the thing that often frustrates me is that so many people think that their time in the classroom as a kid makes them an expert on education: I don't think those people have the faintest idea what it really takes to be a teacher.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing that interests me is this idea that we might be overloading our kids with information. This especially comes up in a district like Arlington Public Schools, where there are plenty of high income, highly educated parents who want to ensure that their child is "ahead of the pack," so to speak. We know for sure that this isn't a path to longlasting happiness (sadly, the fact that the uber competitive Palo Alto high school has one of the highest suicide rates in the country is an indicator of this) but I think the question becomes a different one: how do we ensure students are getting the tools they need without an information overload?