Lead, Don't Lecture: A New Approach to Teaching

This article was a series of narratives from four different teachers and how they are moving from direct lecture based instruction to one where they are scaffolding their students' learning by making use of a variety of effective teaching strategies. (The opening story included a comment about "headache-inducting stink of traditional whiteboard markers" that was a little off putting. Oh, that we could all have the latest technology in our classrooms.) She went on to address the importance of incorporating student use of manipulatives into her lessons so they could make sense of the math they were learning instead of memorizing rules they do not understand.

A social studies teacher spoke to the power of students and teacher taking on the roles of historical characters so that students could better understand the relevance of history. Then students were given the opportunity to make connections with other students evaluating the and commenting on the relevance of the lesson by blogging and teaching them how to do effective research on the internet.

The third part was from a Language Arts teacher whose classroom management included training students to be confident of their own and peers skills so they rely on each other and can work independently so she could conference one-on-one with students.

The final portion was from a seasoned teacher commenting on the skills needed by teachers to coach rather lecture. It seemed to me that the teachers who contributed to this article were all very mindful of the importance of determining the learning styles of their students and dovetailing student learning needs with various types of lesson deliveries. In all the settings it seemed evident to me that these teachers had safe classroom environments where students could feel free explore and ask questions.

I try to make use of manipulatives as much as I can in my lessons. It is powerful when students can then later in the week, month, or year have "remember when" episodes that can spark or fuel subsequent problem solving ventures. I think I can improve my teaching strategies by being more diligent of requiring students to "ask three, then ask me" so that I can make more time to have one-on-one interactions with students. As technology becomes more available to our campus and my own confidence level with using it increases I know having students respond to others work and having others respond to theirs, student motivation in my math classes will increase.