Intellectual Challenge of Teaching

1. Intellectual Challenge of Teaching By: Julie Wethy

2. Expectations • What are you expectations of your students? • Teachers who take responsibility for student learning recognize challenges students and their families face but are convinced that those challenges do not prevent learning and that a strong education will serve students (Sleeter, p.128) • Thinking outside the curriculum planning box • Creating high expectations for your students enables them to use higher thinking skills • Are the students engaged in lessons the lessons you are teaching or are they bored?

3. Meet Juanita • Juanita had high expectations of her students • She taught BEYOND the general teaching standards. • She equipped her students with the knowledge needed to meet her expectations • Juanita incorporates multicultural material where applicable. • Her students created six books on the computer over the course of the school year.

4. Curriculum Planning • Bloom’s taxonomy is a helpful and useful planning tool. • Here are four questions to help you work through Bloom’s Taxonomy: • How does the unit as you have planned it so far, or as you have taught it before, address each of the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy • How do the curriculum standards for the unit you are developing address the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy? • How does the books address the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy? • Using the Bloom’s taxonomy as a guide, if your students were to be prepared for college, what should they be learning in this unit that isn’t listed above?

5. Cognitive Domains of Bloom’s Taxonomy

6. Mini University - Mona • Mona’s 4th grade solar system unit in relationship to culture, academic expectations and Bloom’s levels of thinking • Students work from a syllabus, internet research, write reports in word documents, and use power point to create their presentations. • Her solar system unit was linked to literature and language arts • She organized students into cooperative groups according to knowledge and comprehension levels • She engaged students in learning and thinking across the spectrum of Bloom’s taxonomy.

7. Enabling Strategies • Assist students in learning how to think more complexly than they do presently by themselves such as modeling • Believing that students need to learn facts and skills before they can go on to more complex ideas • Drilling students on the basics to prepare then for higher level work • Focusing less on the structure of disciplinary knowledge than on the process of knowing

8. Scaffolding • Bridges students’ current academic performance with potential • Stage 1- building knowledge of the topic • Stage 2 – the teacher talks through text construction with students • Stage 3 – the teacher jointly constructs texts with students • Stage 4 – Students write independently

9. Meet Gina • Discovery of the English Language Development (ELD)diet • The use of explicit instruction, scaffolding, and/or modeling in her Spanish classroom instruction • She teaches the students to create literacy analysis on books being read individually and as a class

10. Possibilities and Challenges • Build relationships with your students and use the relationship built to model learning and enhance the teaching-learning process (Sleeter, p.145) • When you feel passionate about what you are teaching it is easy for students to get excited and become passionate about it too. • Set high expectations for your students • Look beyond what you think they can do and accomplish