Thursday, September 01, 2005

Teaching for Tomorrow

In his latest book, Teaching for Tomorrow, Ted McCain advocates for the use of problem-based learning. Underlying his philosophy is the belief that today’s schools do not teach kids skills for the real world, instead focusing on what he calls school skills – the ability to memorize facts and spit them out on a written test.

The book is organized into two components: six ways to teach for independent and higher learning; and a model for teaching students to problem solve.

In the section on independent and higher learning, the author forces us to consider many of the traditions of education, from stand and deliver teaching to assigning grades as indicators of learning. He suggests six ways that we can move our teaching in a direction that will provide our students with school skills AND real-world skills.

  1. We must resist the temptation to “tell.”
  2. We must stop teaching decontextualized content.
  3. We must stop giving students the final product of our thinking.
  4. We must make a fundamental shift – problems first, teaching second.
  5. We must progressively withdraw from helping students.
  6. We must reevaluate evaluation.

McCain doesn’t stop with the theoretical or philosophical. He provides us with a model for beginning the difficult process of shifting our teaching practice. He refers to this model as the 4 Ds of problem solving:

  1. Define
  2. Design
  3. Do
  4. Debrief

He provides multiple real-world examples of these stages of the process in action. The one that I found most powerful was the final stage – the debrief stage where we focus on assessment. Several key ideas – student involvement in the assessment process as well as evaluating process AND product – are well worth incorporating into my assessment work with teachers.

This book is a quick read, but full of good information and good examples to begin moving toward a more student-directed education. The book does not directly address technology, instead focusing on qualities of good teaching practice. “The mind that controls the technology is far more important than the technology itself.”

Around the middle of the book there is a discussion on success and failure. Do you learn more from success or failure? If you always experience success, you feel that nothing can be improved upon. It is OK for us, our students, and our schools, to experience failure. That is how we learn. And that is what it is all about. Learning. Continuous learning.  Some schools are propped up by their successes while the rest of the world is moving ahead and changing, thinking out-of-the-box, and developing in their students the real-world skills their students need, not just the school skills needed for standardized assessments.

Posted by Randy on 09/01 at 05:08 PM
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