It’s easy for teachers to go through the motions of doing something without thinking about why they’re doing it. It’s very easy to make a bunch of PowerPoint slides and reuse them year after year to check whatever boxes the state puts in front of them, but it’s important to think about why teachers do certain things.
Why do teachers have their students write essays? Just to make them suffer and force them to study more than they would have to for a multiple choice assessment? No. We want students to have developed and proficient writing skills to prepare them for their future endeavors in life, and the best way to check and improve their abilities is to have them demonstrate what they are capable of. From there, teachers can communicate with them about what they did well and what they need to improve on in the future.
Why do teachers give so many vocabulary terms? It’s not just to test a student’s memorization abilities for a quiz, it’s because an understanding of certain terms is crucial for productive engagement with the various subjects students will interact with in their time in school.
The way teachers go about teaching their classes should have more to it than just making students memorize things for a test or do busy work to fill out class time. Classroom activities should all be ultimately oriented towards the learning goals for the course, and the teacher has to do what they can to help as many of their students as possible to meet or exceed those goals.
This is great! Everything you mentioned is true for great teachers. As one of our peers said in another post, we should turn students’ focus away from grades and final assessments and instead focus their attention on the steps needed to achieve mastery of the subject. By writing essays, students can build up their writing skills. Students gain a broader understanding of what we’re teaching by defining essential words that relate to the topic. I read the article about graphic organizers, which ties into what you’re trying to say here. Graphic organizers, when used correctly, show the relationship between ideas, facts, and information. They prepare students for writing, helping them break up their ideas and build writing fluency. Likewise, all the assignments and activities we choose to include in our lesson should prepare students for mastery. By doing so, students will take more responsibility for their learning and become more confident in the class overall.
This post was insightful and engaging. You are right about the different types of assessments we use to understand student mastery. Students have a very hard time seeing this and often argue with the logic behind them.
I have had many experiences with teachers like you described. I agree that teachers need to have a rationale regarding their assignment before actually doing it. Much like all we’ve learned throughout this course with backwards design, and teaching backwards, we now know how important the planning process is when developing lessons for students. It is important that the objectives are known, and clearly stated, and hopefully evidence-based.
I had many teachers like that in my high school. It seemed as if they had lost their sense of purpose in teaching and they were only doing it because it was the only thing they knew how to do. While burnout is real, you have to maintain your why and make sure that you are doing this for the right reasons.