When Can You Trust the Experts by Daniel T. Willingham

Author:Daniel T. Willingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Problem 3: The Outer Environment

A teacher recently told me a story about switching schools. He had long been a physical education instructor at a fairly traditional boys’ school, but when his wife’s firm transferred her, he ended up teaching at a somewhat larger, coed school with a very progressive sensibility. Students had much more latitude in selecting their work, and there was a lot of emphasis on collaboration and cooperation in all aspects of the school day. Given my description, you can imagine how things went on this teacher’s first day, when he tried to organize a soccer game of third-graders by naming captains and encouraging them to alternate picking teammates from among the remaining students. Some told him that they didn’t feel like playing soccer and wanted to do something else. Some protested his method of organizing teams. One little boy calmly told the teacher that he didn’t know what he was doing. “You’re new. You should ask us how we do things. That’s what we’re here for.”

This example illustrates the importance of the outer environment. A teaching method that had worked well in numerous classes for better than a decade imploded. Why? Because the sensibility of the class was different from any the teacher had encountered before. Students expected choice and collaboration in every lesson, features that had not been expected at his old school. His lesson plan was a pendulum clock placed on a ship. (He is a resourceful teacher, and it didn’t take him long to find his groove at the school.)

We need some description of the outer environment. We need to use basic science to characterize classrooms. For example, maybe the critical features of a classroom are the emotional warmth, the degree of organization, and the academic support offered.12 The problem, though, is that scientists know much more about children’s minds than they do about classrooms. There are serious, ongoing research programs addressing this issue, but the going has been slower.b

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.