Teaching For Depth vs. Breadth
February 23, 2008
Here’s an interesting video that confirms what many of us have been saying for a long time: we are teaching too much stuff, and we’re not teaching it deeply enough. I recommend watching from the three-minute mark to the eight-minute mark in particular; that segment includes the most striking example in the video.
Robert Frank speaking at Google:
Entry Filed under: Education, Elementary Education, Fifth Grade, First Grade, Fourth Grade, High Schools, Learning, Middle School, Second Grade, Secondary Education, Students, Teaching, Third Grade, school. .
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Rick Tanski | February 24, 2008 at 1:09 am
Mark,
I, and a few others, have been wondering lately about the influence of corporate education in American schools (http://ricktanski.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/education-citizenship-and-workplace-readiness/) and I have to say that the problem of breadth seems to fit in the scope of business metrics. It’s very easy to check things off the list and show completion. That makes the quantifiers feel good, but the pushback comes in the form of lost knowledge and application as Robert Frank demonstrates. He uses the phrase “insulation of feedback” that I find noteworthy. Kids react to the litany of curricular checklists and worksheets in direct proportion to our coverage approach. They intuit that we completing benchmarks and hold information as long as their perception warrants, which is often until right after the test. Because they are not engaging deeply, there’s nothing to pass into long-term memory through the higher levels of Bloom’s and it’s gone. We often insulate ourselves from that kind of feedback. Your previous post goes to the heart of that. I enjoy your insight. Keep on blogging.
Rick
2.
» Deep and wideR&hellip | February 25, 2008 at 4:35 pm
[...] a great post on Teaching For Depth vs. Breadth « The Elementary Educator which discusses what happens when you have too many standards, learning objectives to cover (and [...]