PDF Mrs. Q's Curious Classroom Download
- Author: Keara Kirkpatrick Mariel
- Publisher:
- ISBN: 9781320778145
- Category :
- Languages : en
- Pages :
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When teachers inspire and cultivate curiosity they improve student engagement, increase intrinsic motivation, enhance learning, and empower students to become lifelong learners. This book uses both anecdotes and research to elucidate the potential that student-generated questions provide in the classroom. Readers will walk away with inspiration, as well as tools and strategies for creating a curiosity-driven classroom environment.Other books about questioning have tended to focus on the types of questions that teachers ask rather than those posed by students. They have helped teachers diversify their questioning based on depth of knowledge hierarchies, such as Bloom's. This book instead focuses on students' questions: what we can learn from them and what we can do with them to deepen learning.This book does not advocate that teachers overhaul their entire philosophy. Instead it provides an array of strategies for emphasizing inquiry, ranging from small tweaks that don't change the curriculum at all, to the restructuring of entire units. Every teacher will be able to take action based on what they read in Creating Curious Classrooms.The first section of the book is devoted to answering the question "Why Wonder?" We explore research and anecdotes that outline the many benefits of a classroom filled with curiosity, including: engagement, motivation, learning, empowerment, and formative assessment. The second section of the book digs into the variety of questions students ask, starting from the lowest rung on Bloom's taxonomy and ending at the highest. We discuss what teachers can learn from each question type, and how they can adapt instruction once each of these questions are asked. The final part of the book is a toolkit for inspiring wonder and curiosity in the classroom. We look at concrete strategies, big and small, for getting students to ask more questions and improving the quality and "wonder factor" of such questions. The strategies give ways to plant the curiosity seed through classroom environment and culture as well as curiosity-inspiring prompts and activities. Further strategies help students improve the quality of their questions and act on them.
The first full-length history of college teaching in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly ideal—scientific, objective, and dispassionate—and the inevitably subjective nature of day-to-day instruction. American college teaching is in crisis, or so we are told. But we've heard that complaint for the past 150 years, as critics have denounced the poor quality of instruction in undergraduate classrooms. Students daydream in gigantic lecture halls while a professor drones on, or they meet with a teaching assistant for an hour of aimless discussion. The modern university does not reward teaching, so faculty members at every level neglect it in favor of research and publication. In the first book-length history of American college teaching, Jonathan Zimmerman confirms but also contradicts these perennial complaints. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received. But Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it, especially by making teaching more "personal." As higher education grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction. They also experimented with new technologies like television and computers, which promised to "personalize" teaching by tailoring it to the individual interests and abilities of each student. But, Zimmerman reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the professionalization of college teaching, which remains, ultimately, an amateur enterprise. The more that Americans treated teaching as a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it. Nor have they rigorously documented college instruction, a highly public activity which has taken place mostly in private. Pushing open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.
With critical attention focused on education, and the teaching profession itself under close scrutiny by federal, state, and local officials and governing boards, a heightened sense of the need to attract and retain good teachers has surfaced as a national priority. Based on data collected on elementary school teachers, principals, and central office administrators in a large unified school district, the authors draw upon cultural rather than economic or psychological concepts to reveal and explain how educators become oriented to their work responsibilities. The book presents a comprehensive description of the rewards and incentives provided for teachers. It also describes the roles of principals and links the principal's work to classroom performance and teaching effectiveness. Throughout this fascinating account the authors describe and reflect upon the ways in which teaching is controlled by a system of beliefs and meanings that specify the overall purposes of schooling and establish norms for social relationships with students and colleagues.