This is a warning. Today, I abandon the tips and tricks and sharing of ideas and take a sharp turn into just plain meddling!
I’ve spent some time recently scouring youtube looking for great videos to use as thinking prompts. I realized that sometimes I stop the video after just a few seconds. This is all of the time it takes for me to evaluate the content of the entire video and decide if it is worth my time to continue watching it.
Here’s the meddling part…I wonder at what point in a lesson our students would stop the video or turn the channel if they could? If there was a remote control for your teaching, would students store that channel as one of their favorites? If you really did have your own TV program, would the station continue to produce your program or would you get canceled? Ouch! (I warned you)
We spend a lot of time considering “Author’s Purpose”, this is something that showed up on our teaching radar with the adoption of the State Standards. So, let’s think about our “Teacher’s Purpose” for a minute. Each lesson should have a purpose. It might even be a good idea to honor this with a spot on your lesson plan. It would differ a bit from your objective, it’s the part that is about the audience and what you want their reaction to be. Is this lesson supposed to entertain, persuade, inform or explain? If you think about it – depending on your purpose, your lesson design might change significantly.
I’m afraid that often we use entertain as a synonym for engage. Engagement is not about entertaining your students. Some of the more interesting synonyms I found are – pursue, engross, occupy, absorb.
You tell me…What do you do to “engage” your students? What do you do to “pursue” your students? What do you do to “engross” your students? What do you do to “occupy” your students? What do you do to “absorb” your students? Leave a comment – someone will probably love your idea and be a better teacher for it. Isn’t that exciting?
O.k. not only is that deep, but a lot to absorb and take in. I will need to think on this for more than just a few minutes because I could give you examples of all of them for my kindergarten room but I find the “absorb” part to be the one that will take the most thought. I mean, I create opportunities for all of these, but the question is making sure that they truly are engaged, pursued, engrossed, occupied and absorbed in their every day school experience in our target area and not something of their own choosing that is not as effective. Oh Mrs. Fuller, deep thoughts for today!