own questions ("negotiated curriculum")
• Teacher chooses all activities ► Students often select inquiry topics, books, writing topics, audiences, etc.
• Teacher directs all assignments ► Students assume responsibility, take roles in decision making, help run classroom life
• Whole-class reading and writing assignments ► Independent reading (SSR, reading workshop, or book clubs) and independent writing (journals, writing workshop)
• Teacher assesses, grades, and keeps all records ► Students maintain their own records, set own goals, self-assess
Language and Communication: Deepen Learning
• Silence ► Purposeful noise and conversation
• Short responses ► Elaborated discussion ► Students' own questions and evaluations
• Teacher talk ► Student-teacher talk ► Student-student talk plus teacher conferring with students
• Talk and writing focus on: Facts ► Skills ► Concepts ► Synthesis and reflection
Activities and Assignments: Balance the Traditional and More Interactive
• Teacher presents material ► Students read, write, and talk every day ► Students actively experience concepts
• Whole-class teaching ► Small-group instruction ► Wide variety of activities, balancing individual work, small groups, and whole-class activities
• Uniform curriculum for all ► Jigsawed curriculum (different but related topics, according to kids'needs or choices)
• Light coverage of wide range of subjects ► Intensive, deep study of selected topics
• Short-term lessons, one day at a time ► Extended activities; multiday, multistep projects
• Isolated subject lessons ► Integrated, thematic, cross-disciplinary inquiries
• Focus on memorization and recall of facts ► Focus on applying knowledge and problem solving
• Short responses, fill-in-the-blank exercises ► Complex responses, evaluations, writing, performances, artwork
• Identical assignments for all ► Differentiated curriculum for all styles and abilities
Student Work and Assessment: Inform Teachers, Students, Parents
• Products created for teachers and grading ► Products created for real events and audiences
• Classroom/hallway displays: no student work posted ► “A” papers only ► All students represented
• Identical, imitative products displayed ► Varied and original products displayed
• Teacher feedback via scores and grades ► Teacher feedback and conferences are substantive and formative
• Products are seen and rated only by teachers ► Public exhibitions and performances are common
• Data kept private in teacher gradebook ► Work kept in student-maintained portfolios
• All assessment by teachers ► Student self-assessment an official element ► Parents are involved
• Standards set during grading ► Standards available in advance ► Standards codeveloped with students
Teacher Attitude and Outlook: Take Professional Initiative
Relationship with students is:
• Distant, impersonal, fearful ► Positive, warm, respectful, encouraging
• Judging ► Understanding, empathizing, inquiring, guiding
• Directive ► Consultative
Attitude toward self is:
• Powerless worker ► Risk taker/experimenter ► Creative, active professional
• Solitary adult ► Member of team with other adults in school ►Member of networks beyond school
• Staff development recipient ► Director of own professional growth
View of role is:
• Expert, presenter, gatekeeper ► Coach, mentor, model, guide
Source: Reprinted with permission from Best Practice: Bringing Standards to Life in America's Classrooms, Fourth Edition by Steven Zemelman, Harvey “Smokey"Daniels, and Arthur Hyde. Copyright © 2012 by Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde. Published by Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH. All rights reserved.
Teachers Need Support in Teaching Social-Academic Skills
Even as the call for social-emotional learning grows louder, teachers aren't exactly leaping forward to lead the movement. This is not just because state officials, school reformers, and publishers got a jump-start (though they did). We teachers, let's not forget, were students once too, and we didn't necessarily encounter good teaching around social skills, either. Most of us went to school (and future teachers are still attending school) under an authoritarian discipline system. We didn't have much experience with approaches other than rules, rewards, and punishments. Why would we feel comfortable or eager to depart from the paradigm on which we were raised, especially considering how well we turned out? (And it is worth recognizing that most of us eventual teachers were “good kids,” who didn't run afoul of the discipline system enough to taste its harshest lash.)
In our workshops, we often ask teachers to think back on their own experiences with collaborative, partner, or group work in school. Many simply laugh and say, “I hated it!"The most painful problem they recollect is that, when working in small groups, they always had to do the majority of the work to ensure their own good grade, carrying the slackers to the finish line on their own bent backs. We now realize that these folks, so many of today's teachers, were victims of ill-structured cooperative learning, and carry negative attitudes and misconceptions about students working together. And even if we later got some formal training in proper collaborative learning, it may have been be too brief and weak to overcome those early negative experiences. So, if we are going to be required to explicitly teach social-academic skills, we need more support, training, and materials than we've been offered so far.
But it gets even more personal. Some states—Illinois, for one—are adopting teacher assessment rubrics that assign points for classrooms that feature well-structured student collaboration, discussion, and debate. These ranking systems reward teachers who successfully incorporate such interaction into their daily teaching—and punish those who don't. For example, the widely used Charlotte Danielson teacher evaluation rubric requires
