This paragraph from Ken Bain’s book on teaching spells out the questions that good teachers ask themselves.
That question breaks into four subquestions, all prominent in
From What the Best College Teachers Do
the thinking of the teachers we studied, regardless of their discipline:
(1) Is the material worth learning (and, perhaps, appropriate
to the curriculum)? (2) Are my students learning what the course is
supposedly teaching? (3) Am I helping and encouraging the students
to learn (or do they learn despite me)? (4) Have I harmed my
students (perhaps fostering short-term learning with intimidation
tactics, discouraging rather than stimulating additional interest in
the field, fostering strategic or bulimic rather than deep learning,
neglecting the needs of a diverse student population, or failing to
evaluate students’ learning accurately)?
I would like to ask these questions each Saturday during a scheduled planning period as I assess my week’s work and then use the questions to help me plan what I’ll be doing the next week.
This week, my Intro to Lit students are learning about poetry and my Brit Lit students are studying the epic.
Just from asking these questions about my lessons tomorrow, I changed my focus on how to address memorizing a poem. I want to make sure that students see the real point of the exercise: their living with a poem for a longer time than they would if they simply wrote a paper about it or read it from a book 10 times. In order to recite it well, they will have had to dwell with the poem for a week or so. Because this having dwelt with the work is the hallmark of any good interpretation, I’ve come up for a way to practice it without writing another paper about “Stopping By Woods…” My prayer is that they will learn something about meditating on God’s word as well, the way that constant thought and reflection on certain words can help them remain with you throughout the day.
I’m excited about continuing to think through these questions and to use them to better contribute to my students’ growth as readers, writers, and disciples.