They don’t sit still any more
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13 / 03 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
They don’t sit still any more.
A teacher is someone who stands in front of a class passing down the received wisdom of the world. That is the age old image, but it is a myth.
For the past 50 years trained teachers, in Britain at least, have known that that is the least stimulating way of teaching. It might be god for the ego but pupils certainly don’t sit there in a mixture of awe and expectation giving that type of lesson their full attention.
I have been to countless seminars where class management gurus have explained to us how to reconfigure the classroom furniture so that children worked in groups at their cluster of desks and the teacher by definition circulated around the class. We have explored the value of communication by working in groups, in pairs and by explaining our work in the form of a presentation to a small group.
We have had discussion groups, interview groups and demonstrations.
The concept of doing a project is very, very old, but at its core is the idea of working away from the all seeing eye of the teacher at the front of the class. Some of the results have been memorable.
I have seen project books on wildlife that were worthy of publication. They were made by a group of children who had spent a week in a game reserve. I have seen guide books compiled after a day out by the river Thames in Gravesend, and also seen historical booklets put together after a visit to Hampton Court which grew out of the answers to a class questionnaire.
Little children have done shop surveys in their village, and older ones have traced the origins of goods in the supermarket.
I have witnessed a charismatic maths teacher explain the concept of ratio by getting children to ride their bicycles around the playground using different gears and then measure the distances travelled at each turn of the pedal. I have seen another chalk the un-recurring numbers of pye around the classroom and bring the decimal point to life by using a tennis ball alongside number squares. They stick in the memory.
In one classroom I watched as the caretaker came in to take out the class television.....only to stimulate the class into writing descriptions of the thief in their story who robbed a bank.
When it comes to reading their own work or recounting what they have read some classes hardly needed the direction or presence of a teacher.
We now await the extent to which an interactive whiteboard can be used to stimulate learners.
It never ceased to amaze me how creative children can be with just a set of boxes and some scissors and paper. Many an Aztec temple and Norman castle has evolved from a cardboard box and most have been to scale.
In one cramped classroom in East London I saw 50 children make scale models of ships and planes from packs of balsa wood that could have graced a draftsman’s office.
Given a box of paper, tinsel, scraps of material and cardboard, I have seen teenagers concoct a fashion parade worthy of Givenchy and what’s more they even did a good replica of a cat walk fashion show.
I have witnessed plays by nine year olds, put together in just a few minutes on the theme of befriending new children in school, which were just as good as the end of year school play.
Countless class assemblies have incorporated drama, dance and a demonstration on such varied topics as the germs carried by flies, how to greet people in French and how to cross a busy road.
Long gone are the days when the teacher sat at a desk at the front of a class, so deeply ingrained is the need to make all teaching stimulating.
But spare a thought for all of those teachers who find themselves teaching in a third world country.
What do you do when whole class teaching is the norm?
What do you do when there are 100 children in the class and there literally isn’t enough room to swing a cat never mind enact a play?
And what do you do when that is the expected mode of teaching from adults and children alike?
Such are the trials and tribulations of teaching abroad. They are the rewards too because such situations teach you that you just can not take anything for granted in the world of teaching...not even stimulating teaching.
