Thursday, June 10, 2010
Student Dependency?
As I was reading this section of Chapter 6 I continued to question myself as an educator- How can I do a better job of teaching students to be more accountable for their own learning? Students need to be taught how to evaluate themselves as learners. This is a skill that for some is easy- some students are naturals at this skill. They have a critical eye, they have the ability to see the big picture- the end result. There are those students who really need more guided practice- I love when Regie talked about "hand holding". It is not necessarily a bad thing- some students require much more "guided practice". How can we expect students to do this "on their own" if they are not confident in their own abilities. They gain confidence by lots of practice.
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The one quote that I really speaks to me and I think really sums up this chapter was Regie's statement ," I believe the end goal of education must be to teach our students to be independent problem solvers who direct their own learning and set new, worthwhile goals."
ReplyDeleteI agree with this quote and using the OLM to achieve this goal. I also agree with Regie that we as educator must "teach with a sense of urgnecy" in order to further achieve this goal. Some days, due to whatever circumstances that may occur, our instructional time is cut and we are left needing every minute we can get. I am really going to focus hard on this quote this year to ensure that I am truly "teaching with a sense of urgency" and using every second of instructional time.
I am really curious to see Regie's ideas for the student writing process and how she specifically guides students to be self directed writer/ revisers/ editors. I know this is my school staff development for next year and I am looking forward to leanring more. I am also planning on reading( this summer) Jeff Anderson's book Everyday Editing which I am told will definitely help with ensuring that my students are doing their OWN editing.
I LOVE the story about the 4th graders who rewrote the 4th grade standards based rubric. This a GREAT idea I would like to incorporate into my plans for next year. I would also like to create an overall atmosphere of as Regie says " Bam! Nothing can stop me!" confidence in (your) learners."
As I was reading chapter six, I, too, spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the section on teaching students to self-monitor and self-evaluate. Regie says that students have become dependent on teachers to tell them when and what they need to revise and edit (p. 102). I have been reflecting on this past school year, and I wonder if I actually disabled my students with my eagerness to help them revise and edit (mostly because I just love sitting with them and reading and discussing their writing...). I know that I want to make my future students better self-assessers, because they will be able to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses and improve their writing independently. Again, that is our ultimate goal as educators--to create independent, self-directed learners.
ReplyDeleteNext year, I plan to do more frontloading (ie. breaking down the PASS rubric AT THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR like Regie's fourth graders) and be stricter in my expectations for the use of basic conventions. I love it--"No periods, no commas, no service." I also want to do more to teach my students to take over their own goal setting. I did this some in the spring after watching a video of Regie conduct an informal reading conference in which she had the student help set her own goals. If I become more specific in my feedback, it will help my students recognize what they do well, what they need to work on, and they can mimic my language when they set their own goals.