Slow and Steady Shifts
I’m constantly torn with what I feel are the most effective strategies for teaching students and the methods in which students should be showcasing what they have learned. As a History teacher, I want students to be able to memorize facts, understand how the events of history are connected, and how those events and decisions impact our world today. I want students to memorize facts as that seems to be a skill that is disappearing with the ability to search for basic info with a moment’s notice. Some may argue that if something can be “Googled” in seconds that it isn’t worth remembering, but our brains have a fairly significant storage size. Being able to recall information exercises your brain and also comes in handy for any future trivia nights or Jeopardy appearances.
While reading through The Nature of Knowledge and Implications for Teaching, I felt my teaching style follows cognitivism fairly closely. Cognitivism, for the most part, follows the philosophy of internalizing new information and making assumptions and decisions based on the combination of prior knowledge and the new information. Memorizing names, events, dates and what happened in the past allows students to take that prior knowledge and apply it when given information about current events.
When I coach volleyball, applying Bloom’s taxonomy and cognitivism comes more naturally. Players are put in situations constantly where they need to analyze the game situation, other’s emotion and abilities, and make a decision. These decisions require athletes to understand their own ability to execute a skill and when to take a risk or play it safe. The game of volleyball is a great example since there is no clock to kill and teams must work together as a unit to earn every point by identifying their strengths, their opponents weaknesses, and use all available information to make a decision. Less skilled teams who understand how the other team is set up and how to be deceptive consistently beat more skilled teams.
Over my teaching career, spanning a quick 12 years, my course content has changed little, but delivery and purpose has changed significantly. The more I coach, the more I try to emulate that in the classroom. The shift from binders and photocopiers to Chromebooks and Google Classroom has been a welcome change in the sense of organization and class presentation. I’ve now shifted to trying to provide the information and having students analyze why the decisions were made in the past, how the people were impacted, how they responded, and whether the decisions made could be justified. With the polarization of politics today, it’s important that students can critique the information they are seeing and make a decision that’s in the best interests of society.
2 thoughts on “Slow and Steady Shifts”
Hi Mitchell! I enjoyed reading your post. Although I am someone who disagrees about the importance of memorizing specific dates/facts, I would say that having a basic knowledge of history memorized is important to being a full participant in society. It’s important to understand where we have been, to understand fully where we are at in the present. I really appreciate how you aren’t just teaching your students what happened in history- but having them think critically about the content- I think that is so important!
A well written response. I like how you reference your coaching and how the methods which are showing up in that practice are transferring to your classroom practice. I share the belief that there is still a place for memorization in our classrooms, even though the information is so easily accessible to us now in an instance. I also believe that there is a place for spelling/phonics practice and automaticity of math facts and I feel like they have fallen by the wayside. In my experience, students also crave an element of that sort of learning in their lives.