C4T #4

I have been following Ms. Hadley’s blog titled Middle School Matrix. The first post I read was Teaching Self-Assessment. This post is all about her goal to move away from a system where students just try to please their teacher and work to their goals. She believes this is important in order to train the future generation to be able to work the jobs that will be necessary in the future. She then goes on to explain her evaluation of a writing project that she assigned her students. It was a non-traditional method which encouraged independence and self-evaluation.

I commented on her post that I agreed with her belief that too often we teach our students how to succeed in school without really requiring them to learn and understand the material. We teach them how to do well on standardized tests and how to get the A’s in our classes. I also commented that I think it would be difficult to break away from traditional grading and assessment because these methods allow our students to be confident in their easy A’s and it allows teachers to feel confidence in their students with good grades. Finally, I let her know that I think her assessment methods are a really good example of asking our students to become “independent creators and innovators”.

The other post I commented on by Ms. Hadley was The Silence of Learning.This post is about a lesson that Ms. Hadley had designed for her class. As a teacher who values creativity and independence for her students, she required them to do a project in which they pretended that they were an early explorer in the New World. They would use their imagination to create a ship log, a daily log, a biography of the explorer, a map of the journey, and a drawing of the ship. Ms. Hadley said that she was impressed by the determination and hard work of the students…they were silent for hours on end! She also commented that when she would walk around the room to check on progress, students would ask for reassurance that their work was right, but she just encouraged them to be confident in their work and record things that they felt were of value. This doesn’t take away from the role of the teacher though. As she puts it, “student independence only happens when we create and sustain it”.

I commented that I liked a lot about this post, because I truly, truly did. I liked the title of the post, which was “The Silence of Learning”. I told her that I think that too often, the image of education is perceived as a teacher standing in front of a group of students lecturing or asking guiding questions. This can be effective, but I believe that when students are silently learning, they are truly engaged and discovering the information themselves. Also, I told her that I liked how she said that teachers are definitely necessary because we have to encourage our students to be independent learners and not rely on what others judge as valuable.