Sowing the Seeds
By Peter W. Cookson, Jr.
Are you cultivating the seeds of intelligence that are planted in the minds of your students?
Think of every person's intelligence as a garden in which the seeds have already been planted and need to be cultivated. What makes the analogy more complicated, however, is that each of us is our own garden that needs to be cultivated in our own individual way. Different learning styles require adaptive teaching.
When I began teaching, I experimented with a number of strategies to enhance student learning. These experiments ranged from "chalk and talk" to cooperative learning circles to simulations and games to individual quiet times. Here are some major lessons I learned from this trial and error process.
All effective classroom strategies begin with the students. I once asked my students to write an essay about one of their heroes. I discovered that most of my students didn't have any heroes and what ensued was a month-long discussion about heroes, role models and values. In another instance, I taught a Latin class for boys for whom Latin was, initially, about as interesting as watching paint dry. We developed a game called "Latin baseball" that helped them internalize a considerable amount of Latin vocabulary.
Teaching strategies must be consistent, but flexible. One example of how to be both systematic and flexible is to make sure that every day there's the opportunity for your students to debrief about where they are in terms of their learning and then to use that information as the basis for creating dynamic, relevant lesson plans.
We are afraid to fail. Because of this fear, we usually default to a position of safety and routine. One tactic that enables us to keep student achievement as the focus without allowing our classroom practices to become rigid and not creative is to make sure in the course of a week that students get out of their chairs and do something that has an observable outcome as a group. A quiet classroom is not necessarily the best learning environment for all children. Engagement requires activity and, with elementary and middle school in particular, this requires the ability to be physically active.
As you create your own repertoire of teaching methods, remember you students' intellectual journeys require questioning, doubt and disturbance. Provide the safety to experience the uncertainty essential for intellectual striving, and you'll have given your students one of the greatest gifts of all time.
Peter W. Cookson, Jr. is the founder of TCinnovations and the Dean of the Graduate School of Education of Lewis & Clark College. He is also founder of the Center for Educational Outreach & Innovation at Teachers College.