This is part of a series of posts dedicated to moments of new awareness, ideas that hit me for the first time (even if they have been clear to others for years).
I’m preparing for a full-day workshop I will be presenting to a school next week. The school is moving to a block schedule and my job is to start the reorientation of teachers to work in this new model. I’m also preparing for a workshop I will be doing later in the month. For both of these I’m reading about teacher successes and failures in trying to transform their classrooms.
Among the articles I read was a reprinting of a blog where a teacher logged her observations after shadowing a student for two days (the article can be found here ). She sat in all of the classes and participated in all of the activities, not evaluating the teacher, but having the student experience. Needless to say, she hated it, and she listed many specific concerns. One of them was that students spend about 90% of their day listening, whether it is to a teacher lecture or a presentation by another student.
Wait…Presentation by Another Student??
Ding
Ding
Ding
I know that I (and probably many of my colleagues) see student presentations (whether as individuals or as groups) as a key strategy of participatory learning. Students are forced to master material to a level where they can teach it to others. Sometimes they need to work cooperatively in teams, and they ALWAYS have to have a PowerPoint. What could be a better teaching technique? How better to be a “guide on the side” than by letting students become “sages on stages”?
And maybe to some extent this is true. A person does have to master material at a higher level to present it to others. Creating a PowerPoint outline requires skills of analysis and expression. Probably many of these students know their subject at least as well or a little better than if it were presented by the teacher.
But I wonder if what we are teaching them as well is ineffective instruction technique. A teacher who would scoff at coworkers who lecture on a daily basis has little trouble subjecting students to the same thing, only given by sometimes less competent presenters. Do other students in a class learn from presentations by their classmates? Or are they so busy being stressed about perhaps being the next up, or so busy enjoying seeing their friends sweat that their attention and comprehension are minimal? Are we asking students to do exactly what we ask ourselves to stop doing?
As always, I welcome you comments
Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Ldl-wortschatz.jpg
Posted with Blogsy
Why must the student always do a PowerPoint? We should give the students choices on how to present their knowledge of material. That would be more likely to hold others attention and ask “How did you do that?”