Small Steps
Today I worked with an elementary school teacher as she created her first blog ever using David Warlick’s ClassBlogmeister. She would like to use blogging as a way to have her students be mentored by historians. In her “break time”, while her students were with the art teacher, she managed to register and choose a template for the blog. Then she had to leave to get her students. She asked for another session a few days from now to learn more.
Another teacher wanted help with Excel. She needed to work with (enter grades into) the school’s sports eligibility list, but she couldn’t find the zoom button in order to make the size of the sheet manageable to work with. What had happened is that Standard and Formatting toolbars had somehow gotten side by side instead of one under the other and the zoom button wasn’t to be seen. After showing her how to fix the problem, she worked on it for about half the time her students were in music class (another “break time”), and then left to refill her coffee cup and treasure those few precious minutes of solitude (those who have been elementary teachers will understand the feeling) before she too had to round up her cherubs.
A third teacher need help logging in to her email account (the new principal uses email a lot for communications with the staff, and teachers are accordingly using it a great deal).
In one sense you might say that little was accomplished today: only three small things. And yet that’s the way that most people learn, when they want to. It applies to adults as well as students.
Some people refer to these as teachable moments. The trick is to encourage the creation of these teachable moments and have the necessary support available when they arrive. Call it professional development if you will. I like to visualize this process as taking small steps in the path towards proficiency. It is really the small steps that get us there, wherever we envision taking ourselves and our students.
Technorati Tags: teacher professional development technology education support
Today I worked with an elementary school teacher as she created her first blog ever using David Warlick’s ClassBlogmeister. She would like to use blogging as a way to have her students be mentored by historians. In her “break time”, while her students were with the art teacher, she managed to register and choose a template for the blog. Then she had to leave to get her students. She asked for another session a few days from now to learn more.
Another teacher wanted help with Excel. She needed to work with (enter grades into) the school’s sports eligibility list, but she couldn’t find the zoom button in order to make the size of the sheet manageable to work with. What had happened is that Standard and Formatting toolbars had somehow gotten side by side instead of one under the other and the zoom button wasn’t to be seen. After showing her how to fix the problem, she worked on it for about half the time her students were in music class (another “break time”), and then left to refill her coffee cup and treasure those few precious minutes of solitude (those who have been elementary teachers will understand the feeling) before she too had to round up her cherubs.
A third teacher need help logging in to her email account (the new principal uses email a lot for communications with the staff, and teachers are accordingly using it a great deal).
In one sense you might say that little was accomplished today: only three small things. And yet that’s the way that most people learn, when they want to. It applies to adults as well as students.
Some people refer to these as teachable moments. The trick is to encourage the creation of these teachable moments and have the necessary support available when they arrive. Call it professional development if you will. I like to visualize this process as taking small steps in the path towards proficiency. It is really the small steps that get us there, wherever we envision taking ourselves and our students.
Technorati Tags: teacher professional development technology education support
posted by Rich Levine | 7:50 PM
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