This
week, while reading through the examples on how not to teach, I could not help
but feel that this was describing my entire primary and secondary school public
education. And overwhelmingly, that education has seemed to not serve me well,
or as effectively as it was supposed to. The reading directly reminded me of my
Spanish classes in high school where we were assigned all of these trivial
tasks that were supposed to help us memorize vocabulary and remember Spanish
grammar rules. Upon starting my college language requirement, this ability to
recall that information served me well at first, but I hit a wall when I
realized that a lot of my classmates were ahead of me in terms of actually
speaking the language! I had not practiced the application of my knowledge,
therefore, I had to spend a lot of time catching up to my classmates, which
took away time from my other educational pursuits when I started undergrad.
This experience is why the following quotation from Put Understanding First resonated with me: “Schools too often teach and test mathematics,
writing, and world language skills in isolation rather than in the context of
authentic demands requiring thoughtful application.” [1] There were obvious attempts
in my secondary school education to cover and have me learn the information I
needed to complete my graduation requirements, but there seemed to be no
thought put into how that knowledge might transfer beyond the paradigm they
have put in place.
The
questions that come to mind after remembering this experience with my Spanish
class all come back to a central tenet of Learning by Design: yes, we have to
follow mandates to provide an education, but why were those mandates created in
the first place? What skills or knowledge from these mandates can be applied to
the world beyond the classroom? These questions are also central to instruction
in the library, as we have to keep in mind that our patrons are not simply
empty canvasses to throw information literacy on (a.k.a. the To Kill a Mockingbird example in Understanding by Design that described
this approach as “throw some content and activities against the wall and hope
some of it sticks”). [2] As librarians, we want our patrons to apply the
knowledge we teach to situations that occur in the library and beyond. This
means articulating and designing an instruction method that has a clear
intention of producing results. As Wiggins and McTighe state in Understanding by Design:
“All the methods and materials we use are shaped by a clear conception of the vision of desired results. That means we must be able to state with clarity what the student should understand and be able to do as a result of any plan and irrespective of any constraints we face.” [3]
Much
like an educator in a high school, a librarian also holds the responsibility to
ensure that a user comes to an understanding about a given topic and be able to
apply that knowledge for future purposes.
--
[1] Wiggins,
Grant P. and Jay McTighe. 2008. “Put Understanding First.” Educational Leadership. May 2008, p. 37.
[2] Wiggins,
Grant P. and Jay McTighe. Understanding
by Design. (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development, 2005), p. 15.
[3] Wiggins
and McTighe, Understanding by Design,
p. 14.
Foreign language learning is a really tough nut to crack in a non-immersive environment I think. Of course it can be managed, but I think language teachers sometimes seek refuge in memorization-driven tasks, games and activities because they are easy to administer and avoid the discomfort of trying to create some kind of 'world apart' immersion scenario that would better foster true comprehension, synthesis and transfer. After having the good fortune to spend some time in both German and Spanish language immersion environments, I remember feeling keenly that classroom language learning a continent away from sites of practical engagement and application was such a pale substitute that there must be some better way.
ReplyDeleteThe same happened to me. It reminded me of the one history class that I absolutely hated-9th grade. The teacher did not know how to teach. You don’t teach by putting movies on every day and having your students answer 5 sentences per question for a total of 10 questions. As soon as you finished writing your last sentence for the first question, the next two questions would pass you by. So then we would spend the next day in class, rewatching the movie because the whole class asked to see it again. And then we would have all these handouts of poems and such and have to answer questions. The teacher barely lectured at all. I didn’t learn anything in that class, except what not to do.
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