Maybe. We forgot to keep our eyes on where we were really headed, and stopped
off at the first town we came to? I was thinking of working with students when
I wrote that, but now that you bring it up, it's definitely true for teachers
and other learners, I think. It's why Ellin said we don't get to understanding
because our literacy concepts are not "applied in a variety of texts and
contexts," even after we've gotten most of the way there.
When we work with teachers, maybe we stop right before we get to the place our
conversation would help them to "apply to other contexts." So we're teaching
everything as a separate piece of knowledge or skill, so we have to reteach and
reteach and reteach.
It's no mystery that we have to teach fraction operations and percents and
decimals over and over again because we haven't ever really taught them at all.
There isn't enough "understanding" to generalize.
Maybe that's what we need to tell Jamika. What we mean when we talk about
understanding is a lot about generalizability or, if we want to bring in Bloom,
another model that has influenced us all, evaluation along with all others
included.
Maybe, in our work with teachers, we do need to examine our language just as
carefully as Jennifer describes in her post. "So what do you know now about
fluency that you didn't know before?" "What was there about these
investigations that will change your teaching ____ in the future?" or "How will
learning to respond to students in reader's workshop help you to respond in
_______________?"
One of my biggest mistakes as a coach has always been failing to debrief in a
timely manner, or sometimes at all. I continuously try to juggle our need to
develop our teachers as professionals and their needs to have enough time to be
well-prepared for their classroom and/or able to get their classroom work done
before 7 p.m. It's a tightrope walk. But now, today, I'm thinking that by
saving that needed debriefing 20 minutes with the teacher, I'm throwing away
the hour and a half I just spent modeling, coteaching, whatever. Hmmmm.> Good
question! That extra ten percent might be the most important...and in > light
of our other conversations...essential to include in our work with new >
teachers. It is the "So What" piece we often don't bring to our students. What
> did the strategies do for us? What do we know now that we didn't know before?
> That last question I started using after every strategy lesson last May and >
it made a world of difference. > > Do you think we cut off that last ten
percent because we were teaching > strategies as the end goal not
understanding?> Jennifer
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