RT @alfiekohn: A teacher used 8 words to explain how she’s gotten better at her craft: “The longer I teach, the less I talk.” @mrsebiology
— Brian Wright (@DrBrianWright) January 6, 2014
A tchr once came up to me & took exactly 8 words to explain how she’s gotten better at her craft: “The longer I teach, the less I talk”
— Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn) January 6, 2014
So, instead of planning to jabber at students on a daily basis, I started designing learning activities for students. Less me, much more them. More listening to students while they were working than listening to myself talk. It wasn't always a perfect design for learning, but it was helping students learn more than my lectures ever were. As time went on and my classroom became more learning-focused than content stuff-focused, I started having students shoulder more of the responsibility for reaching understanding, for learning how to learn rather than just memorizing stuff from the text, internet, or my mouth. As Grant Wiggins said in a recent blog post,
"There has to be a clear, constant, and prioritized focus on ‘understanding’ as an educational goal. Content mastery is NOT a sufficient goal in an understanding-based system; content mastery is a means, in the same way that decoding fluency is a means toward the real goal of reading – meaning, based on comprehension, from texts. This logic requires teacher-designers to be clear, therefore, about which uses of content have course priority since understanding is about transfer and meaning-making via content."
The focus should be on students using content that is selected carefully in order to help students achieve crucial understandings that students should remember for their lifetimes, not just for the next course. This is done by designing learning activities that require students to learn content that can then be used by students to generate understandings. It's done by observing students, reflecting on the outcomes of teacher-designed (not textbook contrived) learning situations in order to respond to changing and unexpected student needs. It involves collaborating with other teachers as to what works and what doesn't. It involves getting to know your students as people and as learners by sitting down with them and having conversations with them about what understanding looks like rather than taking a correct answer on a multiple choice question as evidence of "understanding."
Spending most of your instructional time talking at students about content stuff doesn't help them achieve understanding. It wastes time they could have used to build their own understandings and learn those thinking skills they really need.
Less talk, more learning.