Teaching Methods (Pedagogy)

Questions and comments on teaching and learning.

Critical Thinking

by

Need for Critical Thinking

Before discussing our need for, or the  benefits of critical thinking, it’s important to have an idea of what we mean by critical thinking. There are many definitions. I like the definition by Edward M. Glaser in An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking (1941) where he calls critical thinking, “A persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports or refutes it and the further conclusions to which it tends.”

Read more

I am not the enemy

by

I lost a friend and lover of 12 years because of my politics. It really hurt because we had made it through [what seemed to me to be] much more difficult relationship issues than politics. It looked as if we would never agree on the President, or the election, or his policies. So, I called her [I left a message on her voicemail] to ask if we could not talk politics until after January 20, 2021. By then, the election would be over and we wouldn’t feel the need to discuss it.

I told her that I still wanted to be friends but that we were so diametrically opposed to each other’s political views that it seemed silly to continue to talk about it. She got angry and told me I was blowing her off. I was not. I just didn’t want to argue.

If I go back to the old neighborhood [i.e.: Roseland on the south side of Chicago, Il.] I have to watch what I say because of my politics. If I speak up or speak out I’m treated like an enemy. Not by everybody to be sure, but I get enough really negative responses [which defy logic or any sensible answer] to things I post, that I feel the need to clear the air.

Because, I am not your enemy.

Read more

What do the British Think of Donald Trump?

by

An Englishman writes about Trump in Quora.

Flag of the United Kingdom

So what is Quora? According to Wikipedia: Quora is an American question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, followed, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions. Its owner, Quora Inc., is based in Mountain View, California, United States.

Flag of the Commonwealth of Nations

I get asked questions about teaching and critical thinking. But this showed up in my feed and I couldn’t resist sharing it with you. I have friends in or from several Commonwealth Countries. I was married to a Kiwi, (a New Zealander), and I have friends from South Africa, Canada and England. In other words, I know people who are basically English/British and I’ve asked them what they and their countrymen think of Trump.

After they stop laughing or cursing, their responses are summed up brilliantly in an answer which I share with you now. I didn’t write this but I wish I had. Enjoy!

From Quora 4.16.2020

To the question of, “What do the British think of Trump?”

Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:

“A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

Read more

Face Mask Boogie – It’s a Fashion Show!

by

Face Mask Boogie (It’s a fashion show!)

Come on people. Wearing a face mask won’t harm you. It might even save a life or two. I know there are many of you out there who believe that the Corona Pandemic is a hoax (What a fool believes no wise man has the power to reason away!). You see wearing a face mask as a political statement against the President and his policies. Ease up and change your framing of the issue.

Don’t think of wearing a face mask as a political statement. Think of it as a fashion show!

Yes. It’s a Fashion Show!

If you find people unwilling to wear a face mask, don’t fight with them.
Pity them and let them know that they have NO Fashion Sense.

Examples:

At first we were afraid:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we decided to get playful:


There’s more fun:

There are so many more  opportunities for personal fashion statements. I’ve included a few of my own.

Read more

Who’s the Adult in the Room? A defense of Two Choices Technique and the Gangsta’

by

Why Two Choices Technique? Who’s the adult?

This post will be written as an open letter to Mr. B. [you can see his full letter in the comments section of Two Choices and the Gangsta’]. This post and many of my writings in general are dedicated to any teacher or parent who has tried the current mainstream methods of inspiring a child (or children) yet nothing seems to work. I wrote Two Choices and the Gangsta’ [as well as other examples of Two Choices Technique in numerous other situations and posts] for those who have reached the end of their rope. I also write for those who would offer advice.

Mr. B. had read my post. He offered some very common, very sound but very unusable advice. It seems as though I did a poor job of communicating just how dangerous my situation was. I had submitted my post, in response to a Twitter post, as an example of how to defuse a very volatile and dangerous situation, and still keep the kid in class. Yet, Mr. B. (and others at other times) questioned whether or not I had achieved a worthy goal, or some measure of real success. It’s as if I were guilty of unfeeling manipulation, or had just sort of ‘lorded it over’ the kid.

The following clarification of that post and my responses to Mr. B.’s valid concerns could be written to any teacher or pundit who advises being nice and student centered. I write this to help.

Dear Mr. B.,

Thank you for reading my post and offering your polite, thoughtful, and helpful comments. Your students are lucky to have such a caring individual as you for their teacher. I agreed with everything you said. It was very good advice for a young teacher in a majority of the classrooms in America where classroom makeup remains the same throughout the year. I don’t understand why you thought it would be of any help to me. Particularly, how would it have helped in that situation of which I wrote?

If we were to critique my use of Two Choices Technique (or to offer any useful advice), I think it would be more effective to take a Socratic approach to figure out: Why did I use it at all? And: By what criteria do we determine its level of success or failure? And then I believe it would be helpful to give action oriented advice. Give concrete examples of what you believe could or should have been done.

Read more

For Educational Policy: Reject Standardized Tests, Embrace Facts Part 2

by

For many students Standardized Tests don’t measure facts or process.

Standardized tests measure the parents income and education as much as they measure the student’s skills in a particular subject. There is so much debate and literature on this that I’m not even going into it. My purpose here is to show parents, other teachers, and policy makers what MY experience has been, what I did about it, and perhaps influence a few decisions about assessment.

The vast majority of my students had math skills and knowledge far below grade level. Read Part 1 for the statistics. Rather than rehash my earlier arguments let’s look at examples of what I encountered with my 14 to 17 year old, high school, algebra students.

Multiplication of decimals – a 5th grade standard

Suppose you were giving a multiple guess test and you gave the problem:

 34.6
x .03

With the following answer choices:

A)   34.4
B) 10.38
C) 1.038
D)   34.9

What would the student answers tell you about their math skills?

Read more

For Educational Policy: Reject Standardized Tests, Embrace Facts Part 1

by

One more issue to be polarized over – Standardized Tests

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need to assess, evaluate, judge, test or whatever euphemism makes you comfortable. Many of us just don’t absolutely need what currently is used for standardized tests.

We just got through testing (and graduation) season and a new semester is upon us. There have been the usual complaints about standardized tests. I agree with all of them. Some universities have even stopped considering the SAT and ACT. I agree that standardized tests in the aggregate show us more about financial background and demographics than they do about actual skill levels or individual motivation. More importantly, for the lower grades, standardized tests don’t do a good job of telling us what to teach, or how to teach it.

There’s the rub.

I have encountered many adults (and that includes parents, administrators, and some teachers) who seem to assume that just because a child has reached a certain age or grade level that they are ready for whatever academic rigors that class or grade level demands. It ain’t necessarily so. My experience has been: you can’t just teach a ‘one size fits all’ Algebra (or any other) curriculum due to social promotion [for a more complete discussion of the destructive practice of social promotion read: Unspoken Obstacle]. Don’t assume that we can ‘Just bring them along’, as I’ve often been told to do.

If we are to reach each child, we teachers need to know what to teach each particular child, and how to teach it. The best way to accurately do that is through some sort of assessment. Few who are against standardized testing have put forth a solution to the need for assessment and what kind of assessment will tell us what we need to know. If you think all assessment is suspect and does no good you can stop reading now. My experience has been that some sort of assessment is necessary – just not standardized testing as it is done today. Here’s why I believe that, and what I did to assess my students.

Read more

Stupid Criminals and the Tramp Stamp

by

Stupid Criminals

Many of my students have had trouble dealing with authority figures. I would often try to teach them effective ways of dealing with authority to avoid going to jail. [See: Punked Out To Authority] People go to jail for many reasons. I always acknowledge that there are unfair laws, unfair applications of the law, racism, bad cops and just plain bad days. I do also admit that the world does contain some very bad people who commit very bad crimes and they deserve our enmity and (for the protection of others) jail. Then I make my students aware of something that surprises many of them. There is a large segment of the prison population that aren’t just criminals; like many of my students (and some of my relatives) they are are stupid criminals. These are some of their stories.

Jailbird Brothers

My brothers liked to laugh at me. Whenever we would talk about police, they would drag up the following story. We had just left a Jethro Tull concert at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago.

Read more

Sex Abuse 105: How Hollywood Romances Teach Sex Abuse

by

Hollywood Romance Movies Actually Teach Sex Abuse!

What do Al Pacino, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Sean Connery, Kristin Scott Thomas, Arthur Godfrey (and too many others to list here) have in common? They’ve all made movies or records which show some sort of sex abuse and/or violence as the path to romantic love.

Sex abuse scandals are in the news daily. There is plenty of outrage but still no one is talking about how to effectively end sex abuse (or at least keep it from being so ubiquitous) other than simply telling the abused to ‘speak up’ (a worthwhile strategy, but limited). No one is asking the right questions. Those who are outraged continually act as if any behavior that they think constitutes sex abuse is obvious, has always been obvious, and everyone knows it’s obvious. Well folks, here on Planet Reality, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

Read more

Sex Abuse 104: The Chimpanzee Lecture

by

Sex Abuse and The Chimpanzee Lecture

This lesson/lecture is amazingly effective at getting students (as well as adults) to reflect on how they respond to social/sexual interactions and how biology plays a hand in sex abuse. It is culled from a wide variety of readings but you can find most of these ideas in two books: The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991); [and even more importantly]: Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997). Both by Jared Diamond the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

This post is part 4 of a 5 part series on sex abuse education and what I try to teach my students. Part 1 is about Mixed Messages. Part 2 is about my personal experience with sex abuse in Hollywood. In Part 3 I examined a common misunderstanding of the law (Attractive Nuisance), empathy and social norms. Part 4 (The Chimpanzee Lecture) is my biology teacher’s reason for not being surprised at the misunderstandings or power plays that lead to sex abuse. I have used this lesson in my classroom when teaching about sexual relations. Part 5 is about how Hollywood ‘romantic movies’ actually teach men to abuse women in order to be loved.

This is not about blaming or excusing anyone.

This is not about declaring any one gender or opinion right (i.e. I’m not trying to say that the girls should learn to act or feel like guys or vice versa). It’s about understanding the biological differences in what we feel and what needs to be taught to everyone. This is not intended for those broken souls who are incapable of learning. There will always be those humans who are so crazy, or so convinced that the way they see the world is the way everyone else does or should, that they are not bound by any social norms. But we’ve got to start somewhere and these are things which need to be taught.

As I said before: I do have my own experiences and a few suggestions which I offer here. Make of this what you will. I believe that if we don’t share as much information as possible we won’t ask the right questions; and if we don’t ask the right questions we won’t arrive at the right answers. So I offer these experiences (which I also discuss with my students in the classroom) as additional information in our mutual quest to teach everyone to treat others with dignity and respect.

What got me started on teaching this lesson.

I started developing this lesson after trying and failing to get our girls to think about how they were dressing. It got so bad [see Naive Sophistication] that, one day, in frustration, a female administrator came over the school PA system and said, “You girls have got to start covering up. This ain’t no barbecue and we don’t need the meat!” I used The Chimpanzee Lecture in my life skills classes, my financial planning classes, and any time a student asked a personal/social/sexual question in which I thought this lesson would be helpful.

I always give the following warning to my students. This warning concluded my last post (Attractive Nuisance): we ignore biology at our peril. Having equal rights socially does not mean we have the same goals biologically.

I quoted Rosalind Wiseman from her excellent book The Guide:

Girls are “…trying to achieve the impossible by pleasing both girls and straight guys,
two groups with competing agendas.”

So what does biology teach us about what those competing agendas really are?

Read more

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox

Join other followers: