In Warrington's article, she discusses the importance of allowing students to think for themselves and come up with thoughts on their own rather than teachers telling them procedures. First, when students speak their thoughts they give the educator an idea of what needs to be taught and how they should teach it. This clarifies understanding and helps the teacher give the right prompts to allow students to conctruct a more correct interpretation of a concept. Also, students do not accept anything until they understand it and they have the courage to ask questions since that is the atmosphere of the classroom. Warrington illustrates this through the girl who stood up to her class because she thought the answer was 13 and 1/5 rather that 13 and 1/15.
Disadvantages include the time constraint. It takes much longer to go through understanding that procedures. Also, if the educator cannot create a safe environment where students feel comfortable asking questions, then this method of teaching will never work.
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I agree that this style of teaching helps students generate their own thoughts. When students are just given the procedure, it seems like their thinking can be confined within the rules of the algorithm.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's always the case that students won't accept anything unless they understand it. I think some students will just depend on others' thinking and not ask the questions that would help them to really understand.
I think you've identified an important advantage to this approach, and that is that the teacher gets a much better sense for what her students do and do not understand. The explanations and justifications offer a lot of insight into what the students are thinking.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't sure exactly what you meant by the second advantage. I agree with Jaclyn that not all students need to understand before they accept something as being true. Was your point that this type of instruction encourages students to not accept something unless they understand it?
I felt like the writing on this entry was pretty ragged. The topic sentence for the first paragraph doesn't really fit with the content. I couldn't find a topic sentence for the second paragraph. The tone was also far from being scholarly. It felt like you were very rushed when you wrote this. Is that true?
I agree with you that some students might not be able to learn effectively through this style of teaching because they do not want to participate. This style of teaching might also now be effective if it is only used for one school year rather than a student's entire school career.
ReplyDeleteI thought you did a great job at explaining some of the advantages and disadvantages of teaching the way that Warrington does. I also completely agree that one of the biggest disadvantages, especially in public schools, is the amount of time it takes to teach this way. Public school teachers really could not do it this way, because they have a certain criteria and curriculum that they HAVE to cover.
ReplyDeleteI feel, however, that the structure of this entry was hard to follow. I also feel that more could be said about students who are too shy to speak aloud, and students who would not be able to learn in this way.
I think you brought up some very good points in your blog and agree that this type of teaching can have some very significant advantages and disadvantages. I agree that this type of teaching can help teachers understand what the understanding of the students is. One point that you didn't address that might have been inportant was that the students in this classroom were able to come up with the answers themselves and gained some real confidence through this teaching method.
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