Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Post 3
As I read for this week, what stuck with me was how important it is for teachers to grasp every opportunity to teach. Mostly this occurs in the middle of a lesson, which can sometimes mean teachers will not pause or stray from their plan in order to address an issue at hand. As the book said, there are learning opportunities everywhere and it is up to us as future teachers to know when to take advantage of such. I never really thought of it in that way before or how powerful a question can be. Another good point is that if one student is asking a question, there is a really good chance another student or even more than one, had the same question. This helps the teacher in a way to know what to focus on or to stop and return to a difficult, confusing topic or idea. As I read the examples of the opportunities, I found the transcripts a little hard to follow, but I think I pulled the overall theme out of the material. My question though, is how far off topic should we go if the question is unrelated. Is that something we can focus on after class or separately during individual work time? Or should we include it in the discussion at the time the comment is posed?
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Unrelated questions can sometimes be the best learning opportunities because they can reinforce a previous topic or concept that was probably not clear when you decided through appropriate assessment to move forward in your curriculum. I believe acknowledging individual questions, off topic or not, is important to show the students that you are taking an interest in their thoughts and opinions but you also have to know you overall plan of attack and decide rather or not you can work with the question and frame it to a learning opportunity or if you have to tell the student that you don't know or that's a topic we can talk about later if you want to know more etc. I had a teacher in my community college that would get off topic for 3 days at a time following a tangent, but at the end of the semester I kind of realized that all she did was focus the tangent towards implicit criteria that the students didn't reflect upon until later.
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