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.
Strong opinions! I don’t know where to start in response! Obviously the larger the class and the less time one has with one’s students the harder it is to know where every student stands. But what is essentially different now is the focus on understanding what students actually understand. Traditionally the focus has been, “ I taught it but they didn’t learn it.” This stance can be heard too often still. AfL puts a different responsibility onto the students (I need to address feedback to improve my learning) and the teacher (How can I change my instruction to increase student learning based on feedback I get from students?). It is really a whole new paradigm and hard to grasp in a culture of grading with so many assumptions. And yes teachers have to grasp concepts before they can teach them – or factual or procedural knowledge too. And before metacognition can take place, teachers have to make the expectation clear so that students can self-assess their progress. ☺
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