2016 Workshop Talk | 0:59:03 | 7-12, Literature
Summary
Classroom discussions with secondary students can frequently feel like an exercise in futility. It can seem like a lot of wasted time without actually managing to cover any one of your curriculum objectives, since the students on their own will rarely manage to come to the conclusion that you are hoping they will. The impulse, then, is to jump in and take over the conversation yourself and revert to a lecture, in order to keep the class airtime dominated by an informed opinion. This temptation is strong because it is a much simpler task to teach students what to think, and quite a bit more difficult to teach them how to think. The downside is that if you only succeed in teaching them what to think, they’ll remember that information all the way until the test, at which point it will vanish from their consciousness forever. On the other hand, if you teach them how to think, thatÍs a skill that will long outlive their memories of the specific material they covered in your class. This workshop provides strategies for using debate and discussion in the classroom in a way that teaches the students the differences between an opinion and a fuss, the differences between an opinion and a bald-faced attempt to score points with the teacher, and the differences between a well-informed opinion and a badly informed opinion.
Speaker
Additional Materials
The Association of Classical & Christian Schools presents Repairing the Ruins, the ACCS annual conference, copyright ACCS. You may make additional copies of this recording for use by your school but please do not sell any copies of the recording, or post it on the internet.
Library Home