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- Cover less so that they can learn more! (The more to learn,
the more superficially and temporarily it is learned. Therefore, the less
learned, in the long run.)
- Speak less so that they think more! (Try not to lecture
more than 20% of total class time.)
- Don’t be a mother robin--chewing up the text for the
students and putting it into their beaks through lecture! Teach them instead
how to read the text for themselves, actively and analytically. Focus, in
other words, on how to read the text not on "reading the text for
them."
- Focus on fundamental and powerful concepts with high
generalizability. Don’t cover more than 50 basic concepts in any one
course. Spend the time usually spent introducing more concepts applying and
analyzing the basic ones while engaged in problem-solving and reasoned
application.
- Present concepts, as far as possible, in the context of
their use as functional tools for the solution of real problems and the
analysis of significant issues.
- Develop specific strategies for cultivating critical
reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Assume that your students enter
your class--as indeed they do--with limited skills in these essential
learning modalities.
- Think aloud in front of your students. Let them hear you
thinking, better, puzzling your way slowly through problems in the subject.
(Try to think aloud at the level of a good student, not as a speedy
professional. If your thinking is too advanced or proceeds too quickly, they
will not be able to internalize it.)
- Regularly question your students Socratically: probing
various dimensions of their thinking; their purpose; their evidence,
reasons, data; their claims, beliefs, interpretations, deductions,
conclusions; the implications and consequences of their thought; their
response to alternative thinking from contrasting points of view, and so on.
- Call frequently on students who don’t have their hands
up. Then, when one student says something, call on other students to
summarize in their own words what the first student said (so they actively
listen to each other).
- Use concrete examples whenever you can to illustrate
abstract concepts and thinking. Cite experiences that you believe are more
or less common in the lives of your students (relevant to what you are
teaching.)
- Require regular writing for class. But grade using random
sampling to make it possible for you to grade their writing without having
to read it all (which you probable won’t have time for).
- Spell out explicitly the intellectual standards you will be
using in your grading, and why. Teach the student, as well as you can, how
to assess their own work using those standards.
- Break the class frequently down into small groups (of two’s,
three’s, four’s, etc.), give the groups specific tasks and specific time
limits, and call on particular groups afterward to report back on what part
of their tasks they completed, what problems occurred, how they tackled
those problems, etc.
- In general, design all activities and assignments,
including readings, so that students must think their way through them. Lead
discussions on the kind of thinking that is required.
- Keep the logic of the most basic concepts in the
foreground, continually re-weaving new concepts into the basic ones. Talk
about the whole in relation to the parts and the parts in relation to the
whole.
- Let them know what they’re in for. On the first day of
class, spell out as completely as possible what your philosophy of education
is, how you are going to structure the class and why, why the student will
be required to think their way through it, why standard methods of rote
memorization will not work, what strategies you have in store for them to
combat the strategies they use for passing classes without much thinking,
etc.
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