Sunday, February 9, 2014

Blog post #4

          Finding good teachers these days is very hard. Finding great teachers is even harder. This generation of students are at a disadvantage because their teachers do not truly engage their students mentally and challenge their students to absorb what they're teaching. One of the most important elements of learning are questions. When we were young, we assumed teachers literally knew everything simply because they had the label of "teacher" when the reality is, they're human and they in fact do not know everything. 

           A very useless question is "does everyone understand?" I use the word useless because it can be extremely intimidating. No student, especially in the middle school-high school range, wants to feel stupid and be embarrassed in front of everyone in the class room so they just don't say anything at all. With that being said teachers carry on with their lesson and knowledge is missed out on. To further prevent this from happening, teachers should ask students about what they say to make sure that they have truly grasped it. Teachers should be encouraged to give the students time to process the questions that they're being asked. Approximately 5-10 seconds to process the question and formulate an intelligent answer. If the students can't come up with an answer their teacher should rephrase the question so the student can understand it better. 

           Educators of all grades should expect "yes" and "no" answers if the questions they're giving dont challenge the students. These are known as open or closed ended questions. Open ended questions are questions that require a well thought out response while close ended questions only require a one-word answer. The teacher should show interest in a students answer whether they're right or wrong. Although they may be wrong, it encourages students if they're asked "that's not correct but what made you feel that way?" Interrupting students is also a terrible thing to do. It discourages them from wanting to attempt to answer another question, it prevents the teacher from knowing if students understand or not, which is ultimately holding them back from learning.

               Another approach to this issue to to have questions already prepared for your students. This way there's more organization, the questions can be pitched and made more clear to the students and they'll be easier to understand. Also, play with the questions. Make them fun. Ask the students how they would ask them. Ask them in a variety of different ways. Enticement is also a good method. If you give 4th grade students a question for homework and tell them that whoever answers the question correctly will get a Reese's peanut butter cup I would be willing to bet that most of them, if not all of them, will answer the question correctly. 

             In conclusion, teachers need to step it up and engage their students in an intelligent knowledge-based learning system. Although it sounds impossible, they need to make learning fun for their students by any means whether be orthodox or unorthodox methods. 

 children raising theor hands in class

You can watch the video here

2 comments:

  1. Very good, but where are you links to the sources you used to arrive at your answer? Also, where is your picture?

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  2. I agree with you that finding teachers now days that are driven to educate and engage students is very difficult. I believe that there is a large group of teachers who want to embrace new teaching methods and engage their students. But I also think that there is a lot of teachers who are stuck in their ways and have in some sense given up or lost their passion to really teach students. Asking questions really is key to ensuring our students have truly gained the knowledge. We can teach and teach but unless the students have understood and can answer questions about the material they haven't really gained anything from the lesson. Good Post it is lacking a picture though which is required for every blog post.

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