Adding to the Teacher Tool Kit

In our last post we acknowledged the work of Martin Haberman and his strong sentiment that schools of education are often focused on the wrong classroom dynamic. Haberman writes that most teacher education programs are focused on psychology and how individuals learn. Those schools of education then turn teachers loose into classrooms to use the ideas about how individuals learn. The problem of course is that the classroom is made up of a group of students. In his article, Haberman insists that this is a fundamental error in the basis of educating teachers. Instead of psychology that focuses on the individual, he suggests sociology or anthropology as better areas of preparation, areas that encompass the way schools are constructed. A classroom full of students is indeed a very different setting than an individual learner.

Teaching Literacy
During my years in administration I learned more about teaching in one specific class than I did in all my other years in college, graduate school, and literally hundreds of workshops. The class was a literacy class that focused on the teaching of reading and one of the texts we used was Regie Routman’s Reading Essentials.

Routman goes beyond teaching reading by beginning with the question of what makes a teacher outstanding? Her response describes every superb teacher I have witnessed, “More than anything, it’s a way of being with kids in the classroom that lets them know they’re smart and capable of high achievement. When you combine this mind-set with effective instruction, teaching and learning are transformed.”

Much More than Teaching Literacy

In the course I soon learned the term literacy meant more than just teaching reading and writing. Routman has many direct statements about literacy but consider the following five:

• Literacy is the way we learn, express, and create ideas.
• Literacy is about making meaning and a thinking process.
• Literacy instruction is most effective when teachers provide scaffolding and explicit instruction of strategies then gradually release responsibility to the student to own the strategies.
• Literacy is best taught in an integrated way.
• Literacy instruction is most influenced by the knowledge level and skill of the teacher.

As a former secondary school teacher I could immediately see the application of these principals to my methodology for teaching physics. And in direct application of the thinking of Haberman, Routman’s third phrase above focuses in on gradually releasing responsibility for learning to the students.

Routman may begin as the proverbial ‘sage on the stage’ with a classroom but she believes in the newer model of ‘guide on the side’. She also has constructed an optimal learning model that walks a teacher through the process of gradually turning responsibility for learning over to the class. They are individual activities, group activities and teacher led activities, the whole gamut, but the philosophy is clear and the models all supportive of the philosophy. Unlike cooperative learning models that begin with the idea of starting with groups in a classroom, Routman walks a teacher through how to move back and forth depending on the activity and the daily classroom objective.

Universal Techniques
By the time I hade completed the literacy class, it was clear to me that nothing was more complex than the teaching of reading. No, not even Honors Physics. It was also clear to me that the strategies used for teaching literacy should be taught to every secondary school teacher.

Most secondary teachers focus on a subject and a curriculum. They do know that they need to focus on the students as people but ultimately the focus is still on a subject and a curriculum that must be covered by the end of the year. Instead, Routman would insist upon a completely different thought, a focus on students, yes plural, how they learn, and upon how the class as a whole can better foster a positive learning environment for one another.

It sounds corny, but teaching students ‘how to learn’ is ultimately the real key. Routman understands this concept and gives great ideas as to how to teach students how to learn. With even a modest amount of reflection, a teacher will immediately see how they might apply her theory about teaching literacy to that of teaching any subject, even high school physics.