NASCAR Lessons for Educators
A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
Main Page: ALV Patterns in Lessons (APL) of 1.0 Teachers
Theme: Vocabulary, preparation, data collection and data use.
1.0 Teachers and NASCAR (Nation Association for Stock Car Racing) race teams share a common goal: Be the best they can be in their professions. NASCAR has lessons for educators to consider. Each lesson offers ways educators may use the mission of The NASCAR Foundation: Turning Our Kids into Winners. The NASCAR Foundation is dedicated to helping children learn how to win, both inside and outside of the classroom, through a variety of educational opportunities. In other words, they show and tell (offer lessons to) children how to accomplish an objective by solving problems along the way as race car teams do.
1. Vocabulary: Coopetition. NASCAR Champion Darrell Waldrop coined the word coopetition to represent the cooperation among racing teams until the last laps around the racetrack. Then, cooperation changes to competition as each time tries to win that race.
Educators will fine coopetition a useful way to describe what really happens to complete assigned group projects. Students assigned to complete group projects and other cooperative learning activities appear to do the same: Work together until someone in the group sees an advantageous way to go ahead alone.
2. Preparation for Races. Race teams have a hierarchy of tasks. Someone is assigned to complete each task on a schedule. Other team members rely on each other to figure out how to complete their work on time, so their cars can appear at each race on time. They help each other finish tasks when in order to stay on schedule. The hierarchy ranges from the team owner(s) to the person who sweeps the floors in the garage area.
Educators follow routines that they can constantly refine to get closer to meeting the de facto standard of every child learn every lesson offered by each teacher. Implicitly, a hierarchy of tasks exists among these routines. Tasks range from matching classroom activities to legal mandates to completing lessons of state prescribed lesson content within the number of seconds the school district has allotted during the academic year. Teams of educators can covert these tasks into checklists for each member to use.
3. Learn from Experience. Race teams keep careful records of which parts they select for their cars and how those parts perform on the race track. They also convert those records into checklists, so they don’t have to reinvent what worked and what didn’t work in each practice and each race.
The ALV Path identifies and provides descriptions of parts of lessons that learners will likely use to learn lessons.
Comment
Based on observations of hundreds of classroom teachers and other educators over decades, a relative few earn a 1.0 Teacher rating, and fewer use checklists to monitor their teaching. The 1.0 ratings are possible. School district boards and administrators can choose to have teachers develop and use checklists in order to reach this standard. Future evaluations will describe their progress, as do score keepers at NASCAR monitor, record, and publish the progress of race teams toward winning championships. These evaluations will clarify which educators use routines consistent with learners meeting state mandates and which need assistance with specific tasks on that journey.
References
- 1.0 Teaching
- ALV Checklists for Educators 2.0
- ALV ( Learners’ View) Path to Learning
- Coopetition
- NESI (New Era School Initiative) Interviews and Conversations about Implementing ALV
- Performance Standard for Educators
- Tutorial Discretion
Related Reading
- ALV (a Learners’ View) in a Nutshell
- A Learners’ View (ALV) of Learning in One Lesson
- ALV Patterns in Lessons (APL) of 1.0 Teachers
Technology is the subject of capability, science of procedures, and teaching of combining these two with content to form a lesson. (ALV T-Shirt Wisdom)
Last Edited: February 23, 2015