Distinguishing How to from What People Learn |
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Classic Education at EduClassics.com describes behavior patterns people use to learn from a learners’ view. Use of these descriptions to plan and instruct lessons can increase contributions of Classic Education in the 21st Century. This page offers memorable teaching of lessons from a learners’ view. Good teachers know when to demonstrate, to start and stop talking, and to wait. ALV T-Shirt Wisdom ALL OF US HAVE ENCOUNTERED at least one memorable lesson that inspired us sometime in life. Some of us have had the good fortune to remember more than one such lesson. The teachers offering those lessons share one common attribute: skill in the difficult art of showing someone else how to make more of his or her life. Their teaching touched the greatness of people who offer memorable lessons. From their efforts, we gain insight and encouragement to act in ways that result in memorable lessons for learners with whom we work. In this spirit, we offer anecdotes and sometimes dramatic incidents of teaching that at least one person remembers and reports. Some are drawn from published accounts, others from story telling around kitchen tables, where teachers gather, and other places where people relate incidents and personal memories. Each anecdote identifies what someone did that changed the life of another in a memorable way. We invite you to submit your memorable lessons for us to consider adding to this list. (Denotes notes, reminders of anecdotes to complete.) Roger, a master’s level graduate student in psychology without experience teaching, walked at the head of the line of preschoolers into an area where the sky and clouds were visible between the trees. He had just finished teaching these 16 four and five year old girls and boys a 20 minute classroom lesson of ways to identify high and low atmospheric pressure areas and how to tell the difference between them. This walk was for the learners to identify these pressure areas by the direction clouds were moving. Without looking up first, he said to the children, “Point to the high pressure area.” The children promptly looked up and then pointed correctly in the same direction with their left hands and to another direction with their right hands. Roger told me later that when he looked up, he almost panicked when saw two layers of clouds moving in two directions. His lesson presented the principle of air movement between atmospheric pressures. He did not anticipate two levels of air movement or of clouds. Yet, the simplicity and accuracy of the classroom lesson allowed the children to generalize from that instruction to two real pressure areas at two levels of cloud movement. (Heiny, 1964) Madame Hsiung, in the early 1930s, watched her grandchildren and great-grandchildren play free and naked in her courtyard gold fish pond.. “If one of them did what he should not – for instance, he dipped up the unboiled water of the pond and sucked his fingers – she never reproved. She gently called the child to her, wiped his fingers on her handkerchief, and gave him a sip of tea from her bowl. ‘When you get thirsty, come to me,’ she said, and let him go again.’ … (Yes, she said to me), women have the greatest power under heaven…The power over life.” (Buck, 1967, p. 24) (Sister taught fifty first graders in one classroom during one academic year to read at or above grade level by the end of the academic year. Here’s how she did it. W.K.) References Buck, P. (1967). My Nanking neighbor. In Reader’s Digest (Eds.). 70 Most Unforgetable Characters from Reader’s Digest, Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest Association, pp. 17-25. Heiny, R. (1964-1967). Field Notes: Illinois Unpublished notes. |