Teacher Spends Two Days Shadowing Students….

[umsami]

This is a great read.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/24/teacher-spends-two-days-as-a-student-and-is-shocked-at-what-she-learned/

[Kathryn]

I saw that. It was a good read.

[Excelsior! Academy]

Agree!  Though none of it surprises me.

[Joules]

Great article! I wish it would revolutionize teacher education and part of practicum would involve shadowing students. I'd love it if they had to go home and do all of their homework, too. We get so focused on the rigor in our own individual subject that we don't think about the big picture of their whole day.

 

When I was a student teacher (high school) my mentor had daughters in their teens. She had so much more sympathy and understanding for what a student's day was like. I learned so much from her and her girls.

[readwithem]

Thank you!  It gives me a lot of food for thought for my subbing days.

[Garga]

I remember all that (from the 80s.) I remember being so tired of constantly taking in and never giving out. I used to think, "How do they expect us to possibly keep taking information in without ever actually using it or producing meaningful output? Don't they know it all falls out of our heads after another week of more information being stuffed into our brains?"

 

I couldn't wait to get a job so I could actually do something and not just sit there trying to absorb non-stop information day after day after day. I often felt like a saturated sponge and if one more thing was put in, something else was squeezed out. I've worried that I'm doing the same to my own kids (too much input, not enough output), but at least my guys can get up and dance about and interrupt me whenever they want for discussion.

[kiana]

This is one big reason I shifted my university classes to spend more time thinking about the material and less time working examples. Sometimes I get complaints about 'not enough examples before you expect us to think about it', but hey, you can't please everyone. 

[fraidycat]

Thanks for linking it. Great read. One I immediately forwarded to my best friend, a high school English and History teacher. Hopefully it gives her some food for thought.

[MBM]

The article is okay but I cannot believe it took Ms. Wiggins two days of shadowing--after 14 years of teaching--to come to her realizations. My mother began teaching in the late 1950s and realized during her first year of student teaching that her students needed to move if they were going to learn; in fact, she wrote her master's thesis about movement and learning. I have to wonder about the author's ability to pick up on what her students feel and need. Now that she is a learning coach, I truly hope she will delve deeper into the many reasons children have trouble learning. Lack of movement is just one.

 

[KarenC]

That was very interesting.  Shadowing students should be included in teacher training.

[MBM]

Teachers and administrators should go much further than just shadowing. They need to genuinely listen to their students and question whether what is being done in the classrooms is helping or hindering their students. Shadowing will only allow a teacher to experience a class from her (or his) perspective. It's a start but it's still inadequate. It is her individual experience and could be far different from what some of the other students might be experiencing.

 

Studying the work of David Yeager and others like him could be helpful.

 

 

. . . teachers should look beyond how they communicate academic content and try to understand and, where appropriate, change how students experience school. Even when a classroom seems to be the same for all students — for instance, when all students are treated similarly — different students can experience the class very differently. Understanding what school feels like for different students can lead to nonobvious but powerful interventions. 

 

https://web.stanford.edu/~gwalton/home/Welcome_files/Yeager%20Walton%20Cohen%202013.pdf

 

[Erica in OR]

Thanks for the link. Shadowing a student was part of my student teaching experience. However, it was only for a day, and based on this article, the impact could have been even greater if the instructor and I had discussed what it was like and how it could inform my teaching.

 

Erica in OR

[maize]

What interests me is that this teacher didn't already know all this. Does she not remember her own experience in school? I'm often puzzled by adults who don't seem to understand what it is like to be a child. Do most adults just not remember their own childhood and the way they experienced life when they were young?