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Society for Quality Education

So what happens after we?ve got students ?engaged??

December 29, 2010 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) at 07:44 AM
To be honest with you, I?m glad I?m not a high school teacher any more. I don?t know if I would be up to the challenge of getting today?s highly distracted students ?engaged? with trigonometry or computer science. But I do remember that when I succeeded in interesting my students, invariably discussions would head in the direction of topics more advanced than were being discussed in class. For example, a student?s question in a grade 11 algebra class might lead to a brief discussion of calculus or set theory. This must be happening all the time in today?s elementary schools which leads me to wonder how well teachers who have been taught that process is more important than content are handling these situations. I agree that it?s unrealistic for elementary teachers to have subject matter mastery at, say, the post-secondary level for all the subjects that they teach, but it would be interesting to see how well these teachers would score on tests of their mathematics, science, history, geography and literature knowledge at the grade 10 level.

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Comments

Interesting comments, but (with all respect) I’m not sure what your point is.

Posted by Stephen Hurley on 12/29 at 12:34 PM

Steven, my concern is that many elementary teachers, because of the de-emphasis on learning and teaching facts related to the courses they will teach, are ill-prepared to handle students excited about a particular topic and wanting to know more.

My argument is that, as part of the teacher training process, we should be verifying their mastery of the subject matter in the various courses that they teach to a level at least a few grades above the level they will be teaching.  This will allow them to direct the “engaged” student more knowledgeably than simply telling them to Google the topic.

Posted by John Bachmann on 12/29 at 03:54 PM

Well, I’ll second that emotion! I think that the lack of confidence in subject matter material is actually on the rise, sending many teachers scrambling for the text books. We can change this though, and I think that it has to come before the year of preservice teacher education.

Posted by Stephen Hurley on 12/29 at 04:25 PM

Here is a link that just popped into my mailbox about improve teacher core subject competency.  It would be great if this was how Canadian teachers used their PD days.

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20101227/NEWS/12270320/Teachers-rave-about-new-development-program

Posted by John Bachmann on 12/30 at 08:06 AM

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