Let it Go! (Blog #4)

So here we go again, reading about "student centered inquiry", "student centered learning", "student centered teaching", "cooperative learning", "teacher mentor", "teacher mediator", "differentiated teaching" and so on... These are the buzz words in education. It has been so for a few years now and that's why I enrolled myself in Instructional Technology. I just don't know if that's going to be enough for me, as a teacher, to learn to let go!

We are talking about an awful lot of years to let go of! I grew up in the "old school", became a teacher in the "old school" and taught in the "old school" and now that I am kind of old (I am not ready to say that I am old yet!), I am told to let it go! I don't disagree with any of these new concepts. I just don't know how and don't see how I can do it when thirty-five 14 years old freshmen have to be contained in a small classroom without computers for one and a half hours.

Grant Wiggins wrote: "I understand, this is difficult. It’s counter-intuitive to say: please teach less and help less, in order that performance might become more successful over time. Our instincts as teachers cause us to over-help rather than under-help. But our kids deserve to become autonomous learners. We need to develop the self-discipline to keep quieter, to build in no-stakes “tests” to see what they do under performance demands, to provide challenges that have no obvious next steps, and to de-brief results."

So I was given six preps for school year 2017-18. French 1, French 2, French 3, French 4, French IB1 and French IB2! I am starting to see how I can practice letting go when dealing with the juniors and seniors, but I am clueless dealing with the younger students when every vocabulary word is new to them. What a mess! I've got to let go! Not sure what will go first!...

Wiggins, G. (2014). Teach thought. Great Teaching Means Letting Go. Retrieved from

http://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/great-teaching-means-letting-go/