Went to Austin to give a talk this week at St. Stephen’s at an ICG (Independent Curriculum Group) sponsored workshop that served as St. Stephen’s inservice–a very clever idea, btw. I was set up to talk both on integrating AP Calculus with AP Physics and promoting interdisciplinary work in English. Finding little in common in those two topics except that a) I do them both and b) they are both reflections of my underlying approach to teaching, I decided to focus the first part of my talk on that “underlying approach.” I also decided to take a panel of students who’d had my English and math classes in order to provide the audience with student input on the extent to which I achieved what I said I did–a sort of reality check for my audience’s benefit.
(The trip was an awesome road trip, btw, in addition to whatever value it had for the audience of my talk–which, judging by their reactions and the number of my business cards that were taken, was for most of them reasonably significant.)
You can find the prezi for my talk here. But here are some major points of the thinking behind the thinking (as it were).
- Problem-solving is a useful skill, both in school and more generally in life;
- The more connections you make to the material you teach, the more likely it is that one of those connections at least will resonate with some at least of the people in the class and serve to hook them i;
- Active learning is better than passive.
There are also a number of constraints on what you can do starting from those (or other) assumptions:
- The school’s culture (which includes attitudes and expectations of students, parents, your colleagues, and the school’s administration
- The importance and family angst about college admission to “the” college(s)
- The consequent importance of standardized test scores
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