Agreed - much more labour intensive in the lesson for the teacher than allowing students to 'discover' things for themselves however, so much more engaging, effective and efficient. Avoiding the 'who can tell me..?" questioning and moving to picking non-volunteers for answers takes a little practice but once you set up a classroom culture where it is safe to make mistakes and students cannot 'opt-out' everyone benefits. Lemov has a great chapter on this in Teach Like a Champion.
This was the kind of model I tried to use for most of my teaching career in the UK because as Carolyn O'Connor notes it is much more "engaging, effective and efficient". Over time I was able to develop my teaching and improved my practice thanks to Dylan Wiliam who introduced me to the enormously powerful "hands down" approach to asking questions (Wiliam refers to 'hinge' questions which are , planned in advance of the lesson) and the use of mini whiteboards to get instant (formative) feedback. I think the model you describe Rebecca should be the one all teachers use but I know that there is still such a long way to go. When I moved to international schools using the IB MYP programme, I was told that I had to be a facilitator, a "guide on the side" and I witnessed first hand how an inquiry based approach was not just highly inefficient but disempowered the teacher and disenfranchised the student. This, unfortunately, is still the norm in such 'progressive' schools and indeed in my own daughter's Australian primary school
My thought sequence reading this as a teacher in the US with more than 25 years experience:
1. Oh, this (minus the acronym) is one of the strategies they taught us in my M.Ed. program in the mid-1990s. It was seen as very cutting edge and made sense but then it went away. (At least in theory if not necessarily in practice.)
2. This is brilliant! I love it!
3. Oh, wait. Isn't this just kind of what we dinosaurs/reactionaries do all the time when nobody is watching?
Thanks for this Rebecca. This is a fantastic, concise step-by-step guide to a timeless method repackaged for a new era.
TAPPLE is one strategy for imparting core knowledge. But there seems to be a missed opportunity here. Sure, Junior just learned the three kinds of rocks but what wasn’t learned BECAUSE of the mostly didactic process, was courage, or patience, or humility , or accountability or dozens of other meta skills that are as useful as knowing igneous rocks come from lava.
Now you may be thinking, that’s what sports, scouts, church and parents are for, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Much of our character development happens in these places.
But what if the teacher could choreograph this meta-learning alongside concept accretion. What if Junior walked out of the classroom, not only knowing the three kinds of rocks, but was also more honest, more self-aware, more magnanimous, more gracious, more able to separate the music from the noise? Times 16 years of formal education, imagine how different our world would look.
"I have a theory that this is part of workload issues for senior teachers: we spend a lot of our time mopping up all the guinea-pig teaching that happens in the younger years." That is both wrong and offensive. I have lots of experience working with both primary and secondary teachers and I can say for certain that primary teachers have a greater skill level than secondary.
Agreed - much more labour intensive in the lesson for the teacher than allowing students to 'discover' things for themselves however, so much more engaging, effective and efficient. Avoiding the 'who can tell me..?" questioning and moving to picking non-volunteers for answers takes a little practice but once you set up a classroom culture where it is safe to make mistakes and students cannot 'opt-out' everyone benefits. Lemov has a great chapter on this in Teach Like a Champion.
This was the kind of model I tried to use for most of my teaching career in the UK because as Carolyn O'Connor notes it is much more "engaging, effective and efficient". Over time I was able to develop my teaching and improved my practice thanks to Dylan Wiliam who introduced me to the enormously powerful "hands down" approach to asking questions (Wiliam refers to 'hinge' questions which are , planned in advance of the lesson) and the use of mini whiteboards to get instant (formative) feedback. I think the model you describe Rebecca should be the one all teachers use but I know that there is still such a long way to go. When I moved to international schools using the IB MYP programme, I was told that I had to be a facilitator, a "guide on the side" and I witnessed first hand how an inquiry based approach was not just highly inefficient but disempowered the teacher and disenfranchised the student. This, unfortunately, is still the norm in such 'progressive' schools and indeed in my own daughter's Australian primary school
My thought sequence reading this as a teacher in the US with more than 25 years experience:
1. Oh, this (minus the acronym) is one of the strategies they taught us in my M.Ed. program in the mid-1990s. It was seen as very cutting edge and made sense but then it went away. (At least in theory if not necessarily in practice.)
2. This is brilliant! I love it!
3. Oh, wait. Isn't this just kind of what we dinosaurs/reactionaries do all the time when nobody is watching?
Thanks for this Rebecca. This is a fantastic, concise step-by-step guide to a timeless method repackaged for a new era.
TAPPLE is one strategy for imparting core knowledge. But there seems to be a missed opportunity here. Sure, Junior just learned the three kinds of rocks but what wasn’t learned BECAUSE of the mostly didactic process, was courage, or patience, or humility , or accountability or dozens of other meta skills that are as useful as knowing igneous rocks come from lava.
Now you may be thinking, that’s what sports, scouts, church and parents are for, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Much of our character development happens in these places.
But what if the teacher could choreograph this meta-learning alongside concept accretion. What if Junior walked out of the classroom, not only knowing the three kinds of rocks, but was also more honest, more self-aware, more magnanimous, more gracious, more able to separate the music from the noise? Times 16 years of formal education, imagine how different our world would look.
"I have a theory that this is part of workload issues for senior teachers: we spend a lot of our time mopping up all the guinea-pig teaching that happens in the younger years." That is both wrong and offensive. I have lots of experience working with both primary and secondary teachers and I can say for certain that primary teachers have a greater skill level than secondary.