Jenkins. Optimize Your School by Lee Jenkins

Author:Lee Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-05-13T15:03:46.634000+00:00

Staff Development

For readers responsible for staff development, I suggest this activity. Assign groups of two to five people a grade level from kindergarten to Grade 12. Do not assign by room arrangement as you do not want any grade level to be able to hear the conversation of adjacent grade levels. The task is for each group to write down five locations on a globe or map that students should learn at their grade level. Don’t take too much time before you bring together the kindergarten and first-grade groups. They are to align, which means that any locations on the first-grade list that are already taken by kindergarten must be erased and replaced with new locations. I have found the participants having fun making harsh buzzer-type sounds when they hear a duplicate location. The next step is to have the kindergarten and first-grade group form a U-shape and invite the second-grade group. They read their list and respond to the nyet sounds by replacing their duplicates. This continues all the way up to Grade 12. When the activity is over you have a list of sixty-five locations with no duplicates. This exercise is particularly helpful for administrators who hold the responsibility of bringing together the teachers to make these determinations in their schools. When a group of administrators experience this activity, they return to their respective jobs knowing how unaligned schools are now, how important it is, and know how to guide teachers as they align their actual curriculum. To shorten the time allocation, I have had two groups working at the same time; one is K–5 and the other is 6–12. Then when both groups are done, the overall alignment is completed as a whole group.

Another “yeah, but” is now coming from readers who say, “This geography example sounds like facts and we have computers now. What about 21st century skills?” With computers, students must comprehend what they are reading on the screen. “Comprehension skill cannot be automatically transferred from one text to another because the skill of comprehension is basically the skill of filling in enough of what has been left unsaid—that is, filling in enough of the blanks—to make sense of the text. The ability to fill in these blanks depends entirely on whether children know what is to be filled in” (Hirsch, 2006, p. 37). Students cannot expect to comprehend text if they have no background knowledge. “A content-neutral, skills-oriented concept of education has the unintended effect of depressing reading scores and diminishing the shared content we need for communication and solidarity within the nation as a whole” (p. 107). Of course we want what is referred to as higher-order thinking skills, but higher order built upon nothing equals nothing. “Reading and critical thinking are always based on concrete, relevant knowledge and cannot be exercised apart from what psychologists call ‘domain-specific’ knowledge” (Hirsch, 2010–2011, p. 31). Television reporters and writers should expect that when news comes out of Morocco they do not need to take time to explain where Morocco is located.

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