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Teaching people to teach is relatively easy. Industry figured it long
ago.
1. Model the lesson to be taught to your teachers to be. Don't just
talk
about the lesson. Teach it like you want them to. Have them pretend
to be
kids. Get them actively involved. With any luck it will take less
time to
teach adults with some background than kids, but if it doesn't it
still was
time well spent.
2. Have them teach the lesson back to you. Not every teacher-to-be
has to do
every part of the lesson, but everyone should do some part of the
lesson.
Have everyone do the tricky bits, though. Pretend to be a kid. You
know the
difficult parts, make sure they learn them too.
3. Be around when they are teaching. Stuff happens. Kids ask the
darnedest
questions. The batteries will fail. A wire will get a kink in it and
stop
conducting. (Happened to me today. Took 10 minutes to figure it
out.) These
catastrophes don't phase you because you know what to do, but they
won't
know what to do. After all, you have experience and they don't.
Don't let
them panic. Be around for advice.
4. Debrief the teachers after each lesson. Have them keep notes on
what
works and what doesn't work. Help them to develop a style.
5. Don't offer too many choices at the beginning. Novice teachers
are in no
position to select, since they don't know the important criteria
about
themselves and their students yet. Teaching is a craft. Craftsmen
and women
tell their apprentices what to do. Once the apprentices are ready,
they
start to make their own decisions and create their own styles.
I have used this technique successfully in the past, most recently
in
Newman's Summerbridge program, a summer enrichment program for
disadvantaged
middle school students. What makes Summerbridge special is that the
teachers
are middle and high school students. "Kids teaching kids."
The program at Newman was largely successful in math and English,
but
science was lagging, mostly because the students were teaching
whatever
their last science class was, and rarely was organic chemistry
useful to
middle school students. Instead, we wanted to teach typical middle
school
science topics like density, food production in plants, and
solubility to
teach typical middle school skills like graphing and
classification.
The problem was that all these highly educated and high scoring
teachers-to-be didn't actually know this material any more than
their future
students. So, I taught to them in the above format. Some of the
teachers
were bummed, because they really wanted to teach something else, but
overall
they were pretty happy because their classes went so much better
than their
peers. Certainly their students had strong improvement in our
admittedly
unevaluated standardized tests.
Call me relic, call me what you will. Say I'm old fashioned, say I'm
over
the hill. You won't be the first. I know, Heck, I assign seats in
class,
too. I change them every few weeks. I sometimes call my students by
their
last names.
But I teach by inquiry. Get a copy of Powerful Ideas in Physical
Science.
It's a great way to train new teachers.
Marc "Zeke" Kossover