Keeping in mind that I taught English as a second language to older elementary school children:
Ordinary teaching methods: constant repetition of unconnected topics followed by endless vapid games. For example, a game of bingo with vocabulary words in each square. Attempts to trick children into thinking something was interesting; for example, calling vocabulary “word baseball” or something like that and dressing up in a baseball cap while teaching it.
Things I predicted would work better: attempts to make material genuinely interesting, have each lesson build on the previous, and create links between different concepts. For example, a lesson on the days of the week including a mini-presentation on the Norse gods after whom they were named, references to previous lessons when we had learned “sun” and “moon” for Sunday and Monday. Attempt to teach how to apply general principles instead of doing everything ad hoc.
In foreign language classes, I found learning grammar to be fairly easy (it’s usually just a few relatively simple rules) but vocabulary was hard for me, because it comes down to brute force memorization. In other subjects, if I forgot something, I could deduce it from the rest of what I knew, but there’s no way to deduce the word “red” from the words for other colors, or from practically anything else at all.
What you tried might have worked better in a science or even a math class.
I wonder how many people are good at “filling in the gaps” in their knowledge when taking tests? There seem to be meta-skills that make academics a lot easier but usually aren’t taught explicitly. For example, the general method of how to turn word problems into equations—which I learned from a computer program before I learned any real algebra. Are general principles and meta-skills harder to learn and to teach than ad hoc methods for solving the problem that’s right in front of you?
As a linguist and practiced language learner AND lifelong classroom outlier, I have a couple thoughts which may or may not be informative, and which are most certainly unprofessional.
The challenge with assessing which of those methods would “work better” in the classroom (the ordinary vs Yvain’s) is that teaching, wich children especially, depends on acheiving two different sets of results: success in catching and holding children’s interest and motivating them to perform more extensive internal elaboration on the content of their lessons (assessing this is not a far cry from assessing what sort of TV ads will prompt audiences to elaborate on the content and become convinced), hence the vapid games and tricking them into thinking vocab is interesting—and success in teaching the material in a way that takes unknown information and makes it not only known to but understood by the children.
IOW: vocabulary has to be memorized and not systematized because the link between sound and meaning is, in all cases except onomatopoeia, arbitrary. But language as a whole is not necessarily taught best by brute force memorization, as context and understanding of the context in which vocabulary words are used and the history of those words can prompt students to elaborate on the culturally-loaded passle of meaning encoded by that series of sounds, thereby strengthening the associations to the memory of the related mental sound-file, ie the vocabulary word, improving memory of that word, and increasing potential for accurate usage by the language learner.
I am quite good at “filling in the gaps” and the main reason is that some teachers made off-hand comments about why and how to do this when I was young. I caught and heard those comments, and all through high school I worked at learning how to do what they said. I would never have figured it out without those teachers’ comments, so if teachers more often and more directly taught these kinds of learning skills and “test-taking skills,” I suppose many more people would be better at this process. My entire K-12 education came from curricula which strongly emphasized teaching students “how to learn” in addition to teaching information and life skills. My younger sister did not have this education for as many years. She is in college now and often calls me and asks me how to write a certain sort of paper. As I flip back through the direct lessons I received on such things in school, I explain to her how to teach and guide herself and why those broad learning methods will help her. For the first time in her life, she is a confident student not cowed by the thought of having to write a paper. That is some anecdotal evidence for the importance of teaching people principles and meta-skills. And if our teachers learned in their education schooling the information that is already out there about teaching meta-skills, then they would not find it so very difficult to teach. Unfortunately, many of the teacher certification courses out there do not provide this information.
Great post. This might be the one thing that I’d wish more people would realize.
(Out of curiosity, what were the creative versus ordinary teaching methods you tried? Just wanting to see if I’m a similiar outlier as you.)
Keeping in mind that I taught English as a second language to older elementary school children:
Ordinary teaching methods: constant repetition of unconnected topics followed by endless vapid games. For example, a game of bingo with vocabulary words in each square. Attempts to trick children into thinking something was interesting; for example, calling vocabulary “word baseball” or something like that and dressing up in a baseball cap while teaching it.
Things I predicted would work better: attempts to make material genuinely interesting, have each lesson build on the previous, and create links between different concepts. For example, a lesson on the days of the week including a mini-presentation on the Norse gods after whom they were named, references to previous lessons when we had learned “sun” and “moon” for Sunday and Monday. Attempt to teach how to apply general principles instead of doing everything ad hoc.
Hmmm...
In foreign language classes, I found learning grammar to be fairly easy (it’s usually just a few relatively simple rules) but vocabulary was hard for me, because it comes down to brute force memorization. In other subjects, if I forgot something, I could deduce it from the rest of what I knew, but there’s no way to deduce the word “red” from the words for other colors, or from practically anything else at all.
What you tried might have worked better in a science or even a math class.
I wonder how many people are good at “filling in the gaps” in their knowledge when taking tests? There seem to be meta-skills that make academics a lot easier but usually aren’t taught explicitly. For example, the general method of how to turn word problems into equations—which I learned from a computer program before I learned any real algebra. Are general principles and meta-skills harder to learn and to teach than ad hoc methods for solving the problem that’s right in front of you?
As a linguist and practiced language learner AND lifelong classroom outlier, I have a couple thoughts which may or may not be informative, and which are most certainly unprofessional.
The challenge with assessing which of those methods would “work better” in the classroom (the ordinary vs Yvain’s) is that teaching, wich children especially, depends on acheiving two different sets of results: success in catching and holding children’s interest and motivating them to perform more extensive internal elaboration on the content of their lessons (assessing this is not a far cry from assessing what sort of TV ads will prompt audiences to elaborate on the content and become convinced), hence the vapid games and tricking them into thinking vocab is interesting—and success in teaching the material in a way that takes unknown information and makes it not only known to but understood by the children.
IOW: vocabulary has to be memorized and not systematized because the link between sound and meaning is, in all cases except onomatopoeia, arbitrary. But language as a whole is not necessarily taught best by brute force memorization, as context and understanding of the context in which vocabulary words are used and the history of those words can prompt students to elaborate on the culturally-loaded passle of meaning encoded by that series of sounds, thereby strengthening the associations to the memory of the related mental sound-file, ie the vocabulary word, improving memory of that word, and increasing potential for accurate usage by the language learner.
I am quite good at “filling in the gaps” and the main reason is that some teachers made off-hand comments about why and how to do this when I was young. I caught and heard those comments, and all through high school I worked at learning how to do what they said. I would never have figured it out without those teachers’ comments, so if teachers more often and more directly taught these kinds of learning skills and “test-taking skills,” I suppose many more people would be better at this process. My entire K-12 education came from curricula which strongly emphasized teaching students “how to learn” in addition to teaching information and life skills. My younger sister did not have this education for as many years. She is in college now and often calls me and asks me how to write a certain sort of paper. As I flip back through the direct lessons I received on such things in school, I explain to her how to teach and guide herself and why those broad learning methods will help her. For the first time in her life, she is a confident student not cowed by the thought of having to write a paper. That is some anecdotal evidence for the importance of teaching people principles and meta-skills. And if our teachers learned in their education schooling the information that is already out there about teaching meta-skills, then they would not find it so very difficult to teach. Unfortunately, many of the teacher certification courses out there do not provide this information.