Dave, I appreciate your reactions - they give me a lot to think about! The points I've highlighted below particularly struck me for their insight, clarity, and even humour. :-)
My own teaching is heavily project-based and collaborative. I think I am fortunate in that I am at an independent school where they have bought wholeheartedly into a democratic classroom, student-based curriculum for the Humanities 7 course which I teach. Recently, they have been working toward writing an original script. Once we began to dig into the project,we realized they needed much work on consensus building skills, and so the project has taken weeks longer than ever before. And you know what? No one has been anything but supportive - indeed, they have expressed admiration for the amazing improvement these kids have shown in group skills. Furthermore, those familiar with the script outline say it works on many levels, and that the characters are multidimensional. So they've been doing some good thinking about narrative structure and purpose and the interaction between characters and plot as well. Yay kids. And yay for our Academic Dean and Head of School. :-) Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:27 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: >However, the skill or reading, critical reading, writing about reading, making >shared meaning from a text -- none of that depends on a particular text ( or >core content). And all those skills transfer to any text. > If Hirsch and Willingham a re right that the workplace skills such as team > problem solving and working collaboratively don't transfer from school to the > workplace, we should send our kids to work instead of to school -- like they > did a few centuries ago. > Or maybe we should redesign schools so they are more like the workplaces our > kids will someday encounter. So learning is project based and collaborative. > Schools don't think they can do that now, and teachers don't feel they have > time to dig deeply into anything, because we're all chasing the almighty > "core content." We have to "cover" so much stuff that there isn't time to > really explore anything deeply. > In my 6th grade language arts class, I am happiest when kids are discussing a > text that catches them in some way, and they leave me out of the discussion. _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
