In Grant Wiggins’s blog “A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned,” he discusses the struggles of being a student in classrooms, and how his discovery would change how he taught in the past had he known. Within the blog is Wiggins’s experience “shadowing” a “10th grade” and a “12th grade” class, where he followed all the same expectations as the students (2014). The overall lesson that he takes from his experience doing this, is that the traditional, teacher-centered classroom, form of schooling is a very difficult process to go through, and requires a lot of focus and patience. Wiggins talks of three main “takeaways” such as that “Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting,” that in high school they sit “passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes” and that after a full day, teacher sort of come off as a “nuisance” (2014). Essentially, students are constantly sitting, making it hard to focus, yet they are expected to listen with very little interaction and freedom of choice in their learning; all the while teachers constantly via to keep them in this process with negative attitudes if they depart from it.
In response to what he sees as a flawed system, Wiggins makes suggestions of how to improve these takeaways. For instance, he suggests things such as “mandatory stretch” breaks, “hands-on” activities, small “mini-lessons” with group work, students’ choice on “Essential Questions,” stand by a “no-sarcasm” approach, and alter his testing, to be more broken up (Wiggins, 2014). After reading his blog I realized that I could stand to learn a bit from it. For one, I could definitely try and find a way to break up the class a little more often to allow students some breathing time, and I could try and find ways to provide them more autonomy. I am not too far removed from being a student myself, thus when reading this I envisioned myself in some of these scenarios and it brought back some negative memories. There is validity to Wiggins claims, and his piece just further validates to me that it is imperative that we as educators start to shift to a more student-centered dynamic.
References:
Wiggins, Grant. (2014, October 10). A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/
In response to what he sees as a flawed system, Wiggins makes suggestions of how to improve these takeaways. For instance, he suggests things such as “mandatory stretch” breaks, “hands-on” activities, small “mini-lessons” with group work, students’ choice on “Essential Questions,” stand by a “no-sarcasm” approach, and alter his testing, to be more broken up (Wiggins, 2014). After reading his blog I realized that I could stand to learn a bit from it. For one, I could definitely try and find a way to break up the class a little more often to allow students some breathing time, and I could try and find ways to provide them more autonomy. I am not too far removed from being a student myself, thus when reading this I envisioned myself in some of these scenarios and it brought back some negative memories. There is validity to Wiggins claims, and his piece just further validates to me that it is imperative that we as educators start to shift to a more student-centered dynamic.
References:
Wiggins, Grant. (2014, October 10). A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/