“Attempts to cover too many topics too quickly may hinder learning and subsequent transfer because students (a) learn only isolated sets of facts that are not organized and connected or (b) are introduced to organizing principles that they cannot grasp because they lack enough specific knowledge to make them meaningful (58).”
I am guilty of trying my best to pack in so much information whenever classes are shortened. I love Block Scheduling at NDHS because of the 80-minute and 100-minute class sessions; however, when classes are shortened, the bell is my enemy…at times. I feel that if I do not go over the last couple of vocabulary words before the bell rings, they will be cheated out of information. What I must understand is that making concepts more meaningful for them is more important than the number of concepts I introduce.
3 comments:
I also tend to try to cram a lot of stuff in. The area that I have the most trouble with is language arts. I have almost an hour a half a day for language arts, but it is never enough. After we work on DOL (sentence mistake finding), spelling, handwriting, grammer activities, story reading, vocab, and other things I usually run out of time to allow them to be creative and write stories. That is one of the main things I want to do with them, and yet I often have no time! Ga!
Sometimes as a teacher we have no choice it seems but to cram as much knowledge into a student as we can. The school makes the curriculum, and I have to follow it. We just have to make the best of it, I guess.
With DI, I am forced to monitor the lessons gained in a week, especially if I want my bonus! But honestly, I do not care if I do not receive my bonus for meeting a specific number of lessons, for I am for mastery more. I cannot possibly go on another lesson if my students do not master it, for it will only affect them later, especially during tests.
So much to learn, so little time! I understand the predicament that we teachers are put under when it comes to ensuring that we teach the "skills" necessary to advance our students (especially on teh SAT-10's). In our efforts to show a favorable test score, often times we are not "teaching" the material that we would like to teach in a manner that we would like to approach. I speak for myself in stating that although I am new to teaching, I find that the objectives somehow get watered down and mixed up with administrative objectives to the point that they are hardly recognizable at all as student oriented. So, I have to agree with you on the fact that I stuff whatever I can into a lesson in addition to what is "required" but often times have to remember the capacities of the students and what it was like to be one, then adjust my techniques accordingly.
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