Know your Students and Know your curriculum

Knowing your students is a top the charts for designing a curriculum. Let us break this down for just a second or maybe two. Let’s say you are an Elementary teacher teaching your twenty students that you see every day for the whole day. Designing a curriculum for them should not be difficult because you are understanding how your students learn on a frequent basis. Now let’s say you are a high school teacher that teaches science at a grade 9 level, math at a grade 9 level, biology at a grade 11 level and 12 level. You are working with 4 different groups of students throughout the day working with them for just over an hour. By limited time with these groups, it will be very difficult to get to know your students well enough to ultimately design 4 different curriculums around them. So, if you don’t know your students understandings, then how will I be able to grasp the big picture here and design an updated curriculum that benefits my students entirely.

Alright alright, no more critical rants. I typed the previous paragraph before I continued on past the first page of Chapter 2. I just wanted to get my thoughts out of the way so I can focus on the importance of a healthy balance between knowing your curriculum and knowing your students.

I’m sure you have heard the saying knowledge is power. Well…power is power. Hate to break it to ya. Anyways, there are lots of ways to look at knowledge. Factual knowledge is essential facts that are trivial in everyday life. Conceptual knowledge goes beyond facts and involves Big Ideas and understanding the meaning behind such ideas. Procedural knowledge is how to do a task using a skill or techniques. I feel the most important knowledge to have is Meta-cognitive knowledge. The knowledge of one’s own thinking process. Why do we think the way we think? Meta-cognitive knowledge is a knowledge to reflect on the previous knowledge’s listed. These four categories of knowledge are defined by Lorin Anderson.

Now to connect these knowledge’s to students and curriculum. First off, your students must have a certain amount of surface knowledge before they can move on to Big Ideas and challenging tasks of deeper learning. Students, on their own account, can activate meta-cognition to monitor their own cognitive process. I think a big upcoming challenge now is shifting from teaching procedure to teaching concepts. Teachers will have to develop conceptual understanding first before they can apply this teaching shift into their classrooms.

I am going to conclude this blog (or rant…I don’t know what this is) with a question. What types of activities could students do to build a deeper understanding on a given topic? I know this question sounds broad. But, what comes to your mind when you think of deeper understanding. Leave a comment.

Breaking away from tradition

Hi friends, I am Daniel V and I am currently playing the game of school. I like to think that I figured most of it out by now because I am in 4th year university and continuing my education. When I say most, I mean that I am a successful product of the curriculum for a reason. So, I must be doing something right, right?

Let's just dive right into things. Let's evaluate this traditional teaching model and see why straying away may be a good idea.

Basically, the models of education need to change right now. The traditional approach to education limits creativity, knowledge and intuition. In a classroom today, you would most likely see a teacher feeding students with information as if they were storage devices. Students sit patiently in rows and listen to what the teacher feeds them with limited questioning. Also, students learn alone and much of the work by the students is by memorization.

I view a traditional classroom as limiting for the student and the teacher as well. Last year in my education class, I had a reading for the first week. The entire reading I forget, for the most part, but I will never forget this one sentence. “Learning is best achieved through conversation.” Obviously, learning can be achieved by other ways, but best by conversation? I initially debated this quote because by having a science/math background I kept to myself. I hardly asked questions because the answer was the answer and you couldn’t really expand on it. So, in this education course there was a lot of group work and conversation on a specific situation each week. I wanted to see if this quote was legitimate or not. Basically, I tested it out with the idea in mind each week. To cut it short, conversation is a strong way to obtain knowledge with very many advantages. You get to dispute claims made by your peers, you get to elaborate when you agree and most importantly you get to hear your group member’s perspectives. It was interesting to listen to everybody’s ideas, and not just mine, on the same question.

At the end of the semester, I became more comfortable with learning through conversation and I understand how effective it can be in a classroom. When I become a teacher I will stay on track with the mandatory curriculum, but I will highly stress questioning and conversation. My goal as a teacher will be to limit direct instruction and incorporate conversation between students and teachers because I viewed, first hand, how effective this strategy is.

Basically, I believe student centered discovery is the way the curriculum should shift. It should shift towards a constructivist design focused on student thinking skills and group conversation focus.

After reading chapter 1 of interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment: engaging the 21^st-century learner by Susan Drake, the thing I found most interesting was students with fixed mind sets. Mainly, because I am guilty of falling into this category. Students with a fixed mindset believe their success is the result of innate intelligence and talent, qualities that are genetic. When these such students encounter a difficult problem, they are discouraged. Thinking like this discounts the value of practice and effort. In contrast, students with a different mindset view failure as temporary because they believe their ability can improve with effort. In conclusion, assessment feedback that focuses on student’s visible actions rather than on assumed actions and personal attributes will ultimately create a healthier mindset.

Final ramble on,by me, not Led Zeppelin.

I want to help students find and then build on their unique abilities, by providing supportive feedback and essentially get them motivated to work on their difficulties.

I can say all I want about teaching and what I should do as a teacher. But, nobody will know what exactly to do until they are fed to the sharks. Basically, placed into a classroom for the first time. We need experience and lots of it. Nobody is going to be the best they can be right out of the gate. If you think this, then you are setting yourself up for failure. We will grow on experience.