Skip to main content

BOOK REVIEW

By Tim Pappageorge




Book Review

If this book is filled with so much common sense--offer choice, give students a voice in their learning-- then why do I find myself invigorated by the potential of my students as I read it?

We want to offer answers, students want questions. We offer safety, they love risk. We want them to play the role of the dutiful student, and they want to play a socially important role, an expert or daring personality. Basically, Armstrong drives home the point that the intense neuroplasticity of adolescent brains makes teaching teens a bit of wild fun, but it's not a game whose rules we, as adults, often fully understand or remember.


For example, one chapter focuses on peer learning communities. In my experience, and through my home school district, we have focused consistently on Cooperative Learning modalities which are informed by the research of David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota. They remind us that cooperative learning is not an activity to do, but it is an awareness that everything that goes on in the classroom should be viewed with the lens of the social scientist. Armstrong, here, offers a similar insight but gets us, as teachers and leaders, to understand the biological bases for this.


In the past 10 years or so, differentiated instruction has continued to enter into the instructional conversation at the high school level. We are learning what our grade school colleagues have been telling us for decades: offering choice and recognizing the important sense of agency in our adolescent learners are really of central concern to the educational process. And yet, we often standardize our approach, and in so doing, we abdicate our own choice to offer students this kind of agency. Armstrong leans into this important issue with specific learning ideas such as homework menus.


Like all brain-based books, the work here tends to over-conclude based on the amount of empirical data available. However, Armstrong is a veteran teacher whose sensibilities--developed over 34 years in the classroom--very much run sympatico with my own. His ideas are practical, and his tone energizes my vision for what my students will accomplish this year.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Conceptual Inquiry Project

By Tim Pappageorge
Conceptual Inquiry Project It's year-long! As part of a yearlong research project, juniors at MEHS research a thematic topic of importance such as Truth, Beauty, Justice, Honor, Same/Other, etc. This month, they continue their inquiry by finding one book-length reading of non-fiction to fuel their knowledge and also listen to two radio documentaries on the topic. We offer them this list of sources: Multi-modal Inquiry PRX: http://www.prx.org/ NPR: http://www.npr.org/ Radio Lab: http://www.radiolab.org/ Re: sound: http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/library This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ Ideas: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/ The Next Big Thing: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/tnbt/2006/jan/ Fresh Air: http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/ Snap Judgment: http://www.snapjudgment.org/ I am so excited to see how the students' understandings of their topics--understandings that have been building of the course of the whole school year--will grow and develo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Learning with Significance

By Tim Pappageorge
What is Learning of Significance? By helping students to make their own connections and understandings, these awesome teachers of significance have helped students to find meanings that will resonate with them. How to do it? connect with real issues right-size the learning task (and then make it even more challenging) problematize texts use multimodal prompts and texts show students how experts make meaning What does it look like? English -- a student researchers the war in Afghanistan with a partner and presents his findings about the Soviet invasion, the Taliban, and the U.S. involvement following 9/11.   These same students connect this powerful new knowledge to The Kite Runner .  In turn, the complex events leading up to and following 9/11 help focus the reading of the novel and vice versa ; as meanings become connected, webs of understanding reinforce significant knowledge. Science -- a teacher challenges his students to read a textbook excerpt describing...
Post a Comment
Read more

How can we read and write with voice? My students will ask you!

By Tim Pappageorge
Question Formulation Technique: "IT IS POSSIBLE TO PERFORM WITH VOICE and TO WRITE WITH VOICE, LIKE WALT WHITMAN" After a brief introduction to the rules of QFT from the book Make Just One Change (Rothstein & Santana, 2013), my students were ready to form questions in pairs (steps 1 and 2); they then vetted the questions in small groups (4 students) and we posted them on the board below. The quality of the questions and range of participation was off the charts!  We are studying Walt Whitman right now, so the idea of writing with voice and reading with voice coincides well with their work to perform a piece of poetry from memory ( Poetryoutloud.org )  I can envision using QFT (Question Formulation Technique) in  broad range of contexts.  It was hard not to launch into an answer to the question or to discuss it; just ask the questions and use them a s focal points throughout the unit.
Post a Comment
Read more