I took a peek at several teacher/educator blogs before deciding to focus on ThinkThankThunk. The blog's subtitle hooked me right away: "Dealing with the fear of being a boring teacher." As a future teacher of a subject millions of students declare to be boring every day, I thought this blog might have something I could grab onto. The author has a series called "Calculus: A Comedy" that I was particularly interested in, as Calculus is the subject I am most interested in teaching.
Although he was trained as a science teacher, the author ended up teaching Calculus, which was a challenge from a pedagogical perspective. The series talks about his transition from what he admits is a very vanilla approach to the curriculum, to something much more engaging and challenging for both the students and the teacher. He goes into detail about the methods he finds to be the most effective (and why) and how teachers can be successful in using them. He also discusses certain challenges that are likely to come up.
Most valuable, in my opinion, are his posts on various course topics. He gives a synopsis of how he presented a variety of topics in his Calculus class. One of the best things about these posts are that most of them have some sort of connection to something in the real world that the students could relate to, and quite often there is humor involved. I'm not sure how helpful these would be to a brand new math teacher who's really just trying to find her footing, but they could certainly be beneficial when that same math teacher is looking for a way to take things to the next level after a couple of years.
The author also has a series called "Standards-Based Grading" that he describes as "a technique devoted to giving students formative control over their own progress (and grade)." The key is to have a grading system that provides a level of transparency for students and their parents that allows them to see where they are proficient and where they still need work. Getting a 71% on Quiz #4 hardly tells a student anything they need to know to succeed, and this series addresses that grading hurdle along with many others.
I'm certain that there are a lot of great teacher/educator blogs out there with a lot of useful information, but I'm equally certain that there are a lot of not-so-great blogs with a lot of not-so-useful information. I think it's up to the consumer to search for valuable information that is applicable to their own practice. I for one am planning to revisit ThinkThankThunk in the future.
Erin, I am glad to see that you found Shawn Cornally’s blog to be interesting, and I also appreciate your observation that some of what he writes about is more germane to experienced teachers. That being said, one of the benefits that Rory and I hope you would derive from this reading is the spark to think about something new, or to think about something in a somewhat different way. Is there something specific that Cornally talks about that you could imagine trying to factor into your teaching?
ReplyDeleteI was struck by how he began each new Calculus lesson by presenting, as he called it, "a genuine application of a new concept BEFORE ever using any math language." This is something I definitely want to try in my own teaching for a few reasons. First, presenting something the students are already familiar with is great way to grab their attention. Second, by starting this way, the teacher is effectively promising that what the students are about to learn will actually be useful outside the walls of the classroom. Third, this gives the students a chance to get a head start at understanding a new concept before potentially being handicapped by unfamiliar or challenging math language. Excellent!
DeleteI had the same experience that it seems that you had when looking through a variety of edublogs. There were a lot of things out there that I didn't find very helpful for my own classroom. I'm glad you found one that you found interesting. I found one that was a collaborative blog among different biology teachers. I found it very interesting that it had a lot of different ideas about labs and curriculum ideas.
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