So I'm going to go against the grain here and probably annoy my teachers, but what exactly are we intended to use the substantive conversations and taxonomy for? I realize I will be using them a lot in the coming year, but I am having a rough time picturing myself filling out data grids in order to complete my lesson plan. I can't picture myself examining whether my class had 81% of HOT thinking. I like the ideas behind the rubric, and I hope to live up to them, but I can't picture myself referring to them much. And I'm hard pressed to see the taxonomy as anything but silly.
It doesn't help (and I know these are bias sources) that my mother, who taught in secondary and community college developmental ed for thirty years and is ABD in a doctorate on the needs of developmental english studies told me she never used a taxonomy, that she didn't bother to learn Bloom's (which was all the rage then) and overall she's been lauded as an exceptional teacher. My uncle, with similar credentials, remarked, "they aren't still teaching that crap, are they?
Please respond if you have a clue, because this is impeding my motivation. Thanks.
I agree with you to some extent. I feel like this is a lot of busy work, but maybe they're trying to ingrain it into our heads so that we know what a valuable discussion looks like. That's my hope anyway.
ReplyDeletei really feel you on this... as each day passes in 402, i'm finding that the taxonomy makes even less sense for classroom use. understandably we want our students learning as thoroughly as possible, but are charts and graphs the way to achieve this? additionally, as educational theory continues to grow, i find it very limiting to focus so heavily on a text that's almost ten years old; in an ever-changing world, it's hard to get excited about writing that is not nearly as dynamic. fellow mac-er rachel nisch made a post about this for last week and i think you two have a lot of common points (http://nisch09.blogspot.com/2009/07/taxonomywhat-is-it-good-for.html)... perhaps someday we'll see why (or, better, IF) these tools are useful in the classroom...
ReplyDeleteI think it is perfectly fine to question the purpose of everything that is being thrown at you in this next year. You may take to some ideas, while not so much to others.
ReplyDeleteWhile I am not privy to your other class discussions, I do want to say something about rubrics in general. They can be incredibly helpful for students to know exactly what is expected of them in an assignment. Personally, I love the tool
http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php, for generating rubrics. It is a great starting point when you create an assignment and it is very flexible. I'm sure you will be discussing rubrics more in your methods course, maybe this tool will come in handy!
I was just wondering, if this stuff shouldn't be taught or is ineffective then, how do you teach teachers how to teach? I know its annoyingly time consuming but I think the point is to get teachers to break down their teaching and to use self-examination and reflection on what they do inanely. I'm not sure what the exact word Malcolm Gladwell used was but I think this is the second level thinking rather than the inane, unconscious decision making that we usually do when teaching. Just a plug for a good book but check out Gladwell's Blink which talks about making decisions based on second and first level thinking. It discusses when and whether the stuff that we are doing is useful or harmful to our decision making. It's psychology stuff, cognitive psychology to be exact but the book is remarkably easy to read and you can skim to the parts that I'm talking about. I just think it might be useful to justify what we are doing in class.
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