Unique Teaching
Dr. Walter Greason
Norristown Times Herald
10 February 2015
How do you honor the best teachers in your life? Do you name
streets after them? Are there statues built to remind future citizens about
their lessons? Schools and universities themselves are symbolic monuments to
the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Under this model, questions
are more important than answers. The search for new knowledge is the priority.
Too often, the attempt to standardize instruction and learning leads school
boards and administrations away from these goals. Assessment and measurement
become replacements for rote learning that dominated teaching before 1950.
These approaches betray the purpose of education and dishonor every generation
of students that suffers them.
Unique teaching recognizes that students are the center of
every classroom. Teachers that understand and connect with their students make
learning the joy it was conceived to be. It is the students’ questions that
drive the most dynamic classrooms. Responsive instruction establishes the
existing knowledge a classroom shares, then it organizes the learning
organically in response to the values of the audience – not the instructor or
the administration. In this way, past knowledge is a foundation – not a
limitation – on the possibilities for growth. Start each class with questions,
not answers, and encourage discussion and exploration of the reasoning
underlying every subject. Help every student understand that extraordinary
privilege of school and give them the tools to create projects celebrating
their new knowledge.
Experience remains the best teacher. Endless lectures on the
arcana of accumulated information are useless today. Process is more important
than product, as Father Edmund Dobbin of Villanova University often said. The
ways that teachers model their own learning processes are priceless.
Demonstrate the intense focus of lab work, critical reading, or program design.
Techniques like” research simulation tasks” let students learn about their own
strengths and weaknesses, while also acquiring the most relevant data they need
to move forward. For more than a decade, “supervised research experiences” have
provided a transformational bridge into academic excellence for lifelong
learners at every age. They challenge both students and instructors to maximize
their intellectual efforts with sustained consistency.
Educators like Sonia Nieto, Karin Sconzert, and Vidhu
Aggarwal have demonstrated a variety of strategies to energize classrooms around
the world. For Nieto, attention to the structural inequalities that marginalize
girls and students of color opens the door to both honesty and integrity among
teachers to create inclusive excellence in education. Sconzert shows the
importance of metropolitan geography in shaping the classroom experience as
students and teachers must account for their cultural backgrounds in making a
positive learning experience. Aggarwal is one of the leading scholars and
artists using digital formats like “Specs” – an online literary journal – to
raise difficult questions, leading to provocative and unexpected answers. Every
community can look to these innovative models to celebrate local teachers
through events each year. The teachers who reinvent their classrooms in constant
response to the widest range of students deserve celebrity status. Take more
time to publicly thank and honor them at their schools, in the malls, and in
your homes.
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