Reading

It is important that you take time to reflect on your teaching style. Consider how the way you are comforatable teaching will work with or cause difficulties for the project you've chosen to do. Things to consider include:

• How much time do you spend in direct teaching?
• How much time do you spend lecturing as your instructional delivery method?
• How much of your insructional style involves you guiding your students to direct their own learning?
• How important is high stakes testing in your classroom, school or district?
• Do you use learning centers in your classroom? If so, how do you use them?
• Do you use small group instruction? If so, how do you use it, and what are your other students doing while you work with a small group?
• How do you measure what your students have learned, and what they understand as a result of the learning experiences you've provided for them?

Think about what you and your students do in your classroom. How engaged are your students in their own learning. How much external motivation do you use? Who is the learning for? How will your students use what they learn in your classroom after they leave your class or school?


Children are natural learners. The years from birth to age 5 are incredible learning years. Preschoolers acquire language and motor skills at a rapid rate. Think about a young child you know. Most three and four year olds will proudly tell you how smart they are. They will let you know they can count to ten, say their abcs or spell their name (whether or not they really can do it). They are empowered learners who take pride in what they think they know. Yet when students enter school many struggle with the kind of learning required of them in that environment. Consequently, each year they become less and less interested in learning and more and more interested in disrupting the classroom or finding ways to cope with the challenges they find in school. Schools are supposed to inspire learning, to motivate students to want to learn, and to provide rich resources and tools that enhance the learning experience. As caring educators we know that our role is to entice and engage our students in the learning process. Think about how you engage your students in learning, then take a look at a Meaningful, Engaged Learningä on the the NCREL web site. Briefly this site contends:

• Successful, engaged learners are responsible for their own learning.
  In order to have engaged learning, tasks need to be challenging, authentic, and multidisciplinary.
• Assessment of engaged learning involves presenting students with an authentic task, project, or investigation, and then observing, interviewing, and examining their presentations and artifacts to assess what they actually know and can do.
• The most powerful models of instruction are interactive.
  For engaged learning to happen, the classroom must be conceived of as a knowledge-building learning community.
• Collaborative work that is learning-centered often involves small groups or teams of two or more students within a classroom or across classroom boundaries.
• The role of the teacher in the classroom has shifted from the primary role of information giver to that of facilitator, guide, and learner.

Traditionally the teacher has been the imparter of knowledge. As a profession, for generations we have followed a model in which we either tell the students (lecture) what we want them to know, or we assign chapters in a book that tell what we want them to know. Consequently textbook publishers have had great control over educational content. In this "traditonal" model publishers provide "Teacher's Guides" and learning is scripted by others who may not even be educators. We, then, test students to see if they have acquired the "facts" that have been presented and grade them on a bell shaped curve. Then we move on to the next topic. In this model technology is seen as a tool for drill and practice or to test comprehension.

Take a look at these examples.