My kids have really been struggling lately with being in the learning pit. In fact, it feels as though some of them have set up camp and decided they are going to live down there forever. It has always been a challenge, especially in math, to encourage kids to keep on climbing to make their way out. My current unit has felt like a complete failure. Students seemed entirely unwilling to do the work necessary to be able to access the math at the 7th grade level. Given homework, about 30% of my students would complete it. Classwork? They would rather chat with their friends. Oh, they missed problems on the quiz? They'll do fine even if they take no steps to help themselves only to repeat the same again if not falling back even farther than where they were the previous quiz. I felt like I was failing them, but at the same time the saying "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink" became my mantra.
Until this week. Something finally started happening. Students were actually putting their skills together to solve the problems they will be asked to solve with the upcoming summative...and they were doing it. All of the sudden, they were starting to fly right out of that pit of learning. They were asking really good questions that were specific and when they were wrong, they were enthusiastic about figuring out what was the mistake and trying the problem again. All I hope it that it keeps up and they continue with the progress they are making.
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Read: Can Creativity Taught? This document outlines Louis R. Mobley's (former director of the IBM Executive School) approach to answering this question. You will refer to this in your blog post - R-Reflect.
Reading through the article I found myself nodding along quite often. I have always felt that creativity can often be stifled with some of the ways we teach our students. Instead of teaching them to come at a problem with a creative lens, thinking about math, we tend to try and teach students step by step how to do something which ends up stripping away the context of when to actually apply whatever it is we were teaching them. They learn that only in this situation do we use that specific method. I felt this way when I was in school myself. I felt that the higher up in education I went, the more I was losing the creativity that really was important to me. I am always doing my best to try to give students tasks where they have to figure out what to apply on their own and trying to think about the problem in a way that is outside of the box. They always hate it stating they want me to just tell them exactly what to do. Its uncomfortable for them. But I persist and they eventually come up with solutions I never had thought of. I want to continue pushing them in these ways for this particular reason. Adults need that creativity to deal with a world that is constantly changing and to be able to solve problems that haven't even been invented yet. |
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November 2019
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