Seen this before and seeing it again currently. The district puts in mandates on how to teach "better" and even includes it in the evaluation. They want students to do experiential learning or like now, student need to collaborate on eve...
Seen this before and seeing it again currently. The district puts in mandates on how to teach "better" and even includes it in the evaluation. They want students to do experiential learning or like now, student need to collaborate on everything. They write a response to a prompt? Have them justify their response to a peer. Then the peer critiques it. Then they rewrite and repeat the process. They do a presentation? Justify/critique/edit/justify/critique every single slide. Thing is, the district is not wrong. These are good ideas but there is a failure built into the system. 1) They want this to occur every single time the students do work. 2) These are techniques that take a lot of time. All of the sudden lessons are taking multiple days. 30 minutes for students to use blocks to derive a formula rather than a teacher demonstration. An hour to look up resources on the causes of WWI and with an evaluation of each resource to see if it's reliable (information literacy) rather than giving them a list of 5 websites to use. 3) And here is the big one. At the same time, the district is taking away instructional time. We have more useless PD days every year and now the district is going to require that one day per week the teachers do no instruction but rather use this hugely expensive software so every student can train for the SAT/PSAT. So sure, I'll teach better according to your definition. But how do you expect me to cover everything I have to when there is not enough time to do so? submitted by /u/DrakeSavory [link] [comments]