The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
-Khalil Gibran
This lesson and the next will be the last of our discussions on strategies in general, and strategies to facilitate specific tasks, in particular. This week, concentrate on the new strategies introduced and consider which one/ones you are using, which ones you might try or those you consider inappropriate for your purposes. If they are new to you, you are urged to try one or more of them if you can, on yourself if not on a group of students. Obviously, in trying to meet the needs of ALL students in your class, regardless of individual strengths or gaps in learning, you must try to budget your strategic repertoire so that the strategies you choose to teach/use will be of greatest benefit to the maximum number of learners. Reflect on your thoughts and processes in your journal.
I try to avoid acting like a used car salesperson but I often encourage teachers to try out new strategies with their students.This process is sometimes done when teachers come to do collaborative planning with me in my office or over the glow of the photocopier. Some teachers get into a rut professionally and do everything the same way each year. Sometimes this rut can be a good learning environment for students and sometimes not. When a Socials teacher came into my office last year, he wanted to do a research project on Middle Ages and he had a long list of areas that he wanted each student to cover. I offered him the idea of doing the research project in stations and that each small group of student would become the experts in their area and part of their assignment was to teach it to the class in a presentation. The teacher responded positively to the idea and the research blocks went well in the library and he was surprised by the depth of the students' work. I requested that he create diverse groups of students and they worked well together. ESL students worked along side monolingual students and each student found a positive way to contribute to their groups work. Now he does his project in this manner and he has returned to the library for other projects as well. Collaboration must be based on mutual respect and I don't want my teachers to think that I am a know-it-all. I work with and for them and for the benefit of students.
Teacher Librarians have to be sales people of educational innovation. Part of my job is to keep on top on things and to make my teachers look really good to other staff and to their students. I especially like working with student teachers and new teachers because they are so receptive to new ideas. Good news travels fast because one teacher talks to another and they end up using a new strategy or coming to the library with their class. This year, I am going to suggest to my administration that we take 5 minutes of every staff meeting to do a best practices sharing session. There are amazing teachers in my school and I learn about their practice when I "crash" different lunch rooms but we are so isolated in secondary. Staff meetings should not just be talking heads giving us the same information that we get through email but a spirited exchange of ideas. What happen to talking about vision and our philosophies as teachers? We get all busy and we forget to do what teachers do best: share!
The strategy is only as good as the teacher who is using it. I have used some games that have been a total success and then gone flat with another group of students. Each time I use a new strategy, I need to gauge how things are going and change things if it is not working. There is nothing wrong as teachers to stop the class and ask students "Does this activity really suck?". It shows respect not to waste students' valuable time and to reach into our tool box of experience and pull out another way of getting to the same goal. I wouldn't use a wiki if just paper and markers will do so we have to be wary of strategizing our students to educational death.
I would like to start a dialogue around immigrant and ESL student issues. Often I hear ESL students being talked about as a learning "burden" and as students with learning disabilities. They have many abilities and we need to start talking about how we can teach ESL students better and this benefit all the students in the room.
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