Key Ideas of the Videos and How They Relate to 21st Century Teaching & Learning The videos highlighted brilliantly the idea of bringing pedagogy to the 21st Century minds of our students. To see our students as a wealth of creative ideas that should be tapped into as opposed to redirected. I particularly appreciated when the speaker, Howard Gardner, used the old adage of creativity as thinking outside the box, then added that one must first have a box if one was to think outside of it. I suppose we all feel comfortable with this metaphor for creative thinking. We can now see that too often our 19th Century model of instruction only served to teach what was in the box and how to bring a young child's mind to it. Woven throughout the 4 C's is the practice of meta-cognition. Students are asked to describe what their minds were doing while problem solving. This practice is going to need to be taught explicitly through reciprocal teaching practices for students at my grade level, but is is critical to getting students to know what they are thinking and why. Stating evidence, forming opinions, comparing & contrasting, predicting, synthesizing, analyzing are all modes of deeper thinking tasks that need to be taught and then expected. This method of teaching through questioning will prove to build a much more useful and supportive box. Considering the information in the context of my classroom and teaching practice. The creative aspect of teaching is what keeps me in the profession and what drew me to it in the first place. So many teachers I meet say they always aspired to be a teacher, did well in school and were very well behaved. This is in no way how I would describe myself then or now. I was an extremely curious child that questioned everything and why we were doing it. My teachers did not like this and the amount of punishments I received was proof of that. I was often out of my seat, talking to others and questioning authority. I think many that know me would say that this is still true. I am at my worst behavior when asked to sit in a meeting that I feel does not address my needs or interests. Working as a teacher for so many years I have worried that the creativity was not only being stomped out of my students, but also out of me. I am excited to see that pedagogy is taking a new turn in it's desire to instruct and give opportunity to creativity in the classroom. I consider the creativity aspect of the 4 C's as important and interlinked as the others. While explicitly teaching the standards we must also give opportunities to students to synthesize their experiences and knowledge with their new learning. We often limit our idea of what is creative to the arts, but it is the broader notion of creativity that can apply itself to all matters of thinking and problem solving. Insights of analysis. Creativity, while it may not be easily taught, it certainly can and ought to be encouraged. Asking open ended questions and presenting problems can open dialogue to help students with their own thought processes and learning those of others. It is not enough to answer the question but also to be prompted to explain the thinking that brought you to it. This model of instruction looks more like learning facilitation and can be uncomfortable not just for the students but for the teacher. How long do I let them struggle? Is this amount of time worthy of the knowledge gained? How will I know? Is the structure I give to the creative learning enough to meet the goals or outcomes of the task? A perceived common thread to me was the idea of bringing teaching to the student's mind. The engagement and passion to learn must be tapped into first. The discipline of work will follow if the students are finding their work meaningful to themselves. Students need to feel that they have choices in what they learn and how. As students are working they need to feel like they are doing it well and that doing it well matters. Being proficient is a great motivator. Also, it needs to be fun! We have been learning about the young mind and it's creative powers. It seems like a disservice, if not totally cruel, to find we are teaching students to unlearn this great gift. As teachers we need to use this powerful young thinking as the fulcrum to our teaching and not as the ideomatic square peg that we hammer into a square hole.
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AuthorJennifer Wade ArchivesCategories |