Patrick Malley

On Coverage versus Depth

Clay Burell:

Philosophically, I’m attracted to an approach that says flatly: I’m not teaching you all the content so you can get a grade for your transcript. If I do that, I impoverish something more valuable than your GPA (if that’s the case), because you’ll remember a few things short-term, but learn next to nothing of value.

His whole comment is well worth a read actually. Good argument for constructivist education.

As an Advanced Placement teacher, I’m guilty of apologizing to my students for being so content-driven, and am ashamed of myself for doing this in spite of the fact that I know better.

Philosophically, I know that the person who learns the most in the classroom is the person who does the most. Yet, I have all of these lesson plans and bullet-by-bullet slideshows that took up the majority of my free time for an entire year while I made them. Now that I have grad classes, a family, and a growing business, it’s so easy to just walk in and give the same mediocre lesson that I gave last year, even knowing that it’s not the most effective way of doing things.

Yet, I’m plagued by my own knowledge that something better is out there and I’m doing nothing to fix my behavior.