It made me kind of sad when the British students preferred copying things from a chalkboard. I tried to implement a flipped classroom -- 15 minutes of "lecture" at the beginning, 25 minutes of group practice, 15 minutes of individual practice, then a 5 minute formative assessment/quiz -- when I taught chemistry in a low-income public high school in Mississippi. My students were really disoriented at first and preferred the less mentally-active work of copying notes or listening to a teacher... I actually had to tell them not to copy everything off my 15 minute presentations because they could just print it later or view it on their phones, and I'd rather they actively engage with the material. Many complained that they'd rather get a packet of notes to transcribe during class time.
The good news: by my second year of teaching, kids from the first year were telling their friends how a flipped classroom takes work away from studying notes and puts them into your classroom time. My students were more confident when they practiced concepts in class then assessed their own knowledge with a low-pressure quiz at the end of class. My second year I had students (and their parents) fighting to be in my chemistry classroom instead of a 30-year veteran's traditional classroom with 55 minutes of lecture.
Based on what we know about learning and cognition -- and with the way that the internet and mobile technology is de-emphasizing the need for memorized fact and emphasizing asking questions and performing creative problem solving -- I don't know why we're looking towards rote learning models to educate a 21st century workforce.
I actually had to tell them not to copy everything off my 15 minute presentations because they could just print it later or view it on their phones, and I'd rather they actively engage with the material.
I don't know about your students but when I was in school copying things down was exactly how I engaged with the material. The act of transcription was how I remembered it -- I wouldn't even review the notes again later.
Is it really normal for American high school teachers to lecture for the entire period? No exercises, just note-taking?
I hazard to guess that the British students prefer copying things from a chalkboard because it's a novelty and requires considerably less effort than doing exercises. If they did it on a regular basis they'd quickly get bored.
It was when I was in High School. I used to alternate with a friend: one brings the notebook, one brings the pillow.
Pro Tip: Do not try the above in English class; many teachers will use subjectively graded assignments to punish you for sleeping through their lectures.
Depends on the class. History tends to have a lot of lectures. Science classes, math and English I don't recall as many (this was about 10 years ago). Also varies by teacher and I would assume school.
Math is probably the class that most easily follows this pattern: the teacher demonstrates how to solve a category of problem, the entire class practices it together with the teacher calling on students to provide answers, then after students are confidently solving the problem together they try to solve them independently -- a process that usually continues after class with homework problem sets.
Science classes in higher-income schools often follow this method too -- present a problem/question, introduce some bit of science knowledge, then investigate with a lab -- but low-income schools lack the resources to do lots of labs and as a result it's a lot of copying vocab/notes and doing problem sets that tend to be vocabulary-heavy.
Yeah, I think that sounds reasonable to me. I was thinking about my history classes more and there was a decent amount of interaction, just my memory about it was a bit fuzzy, since I haven't thought about the classes themselves in some years.
It had a decent amount of q/a and discussion, but it's rather hard to escape lectures in history. They didn't bother me though, since I had great history teachers that knew their stuff and made the lectures themselves interesting through anecdotes and personal experience. History was always my favorite subject, even though I obtained a degree in computer science.
I taught English for 5 years in Japan (even though completely unqualified... cough... cough...). In my last year I did something very similar. The thing that got me to change was that I started tracking how much time I spent 1-1 with each of my students. If you are lecture focussed, you end up spending mere minutes a year actually interacting with an individual student. I remember setting myself a goal of spending 10 minutes with each student every term (still woefully insufficient!!!) and realizing that it was impossible unless I radically changed the class structure.
I actually moved the assessment/quiz to the beginning of the class as a "review", followed by 5 minutes of questions. This allowed students to gauge how they were doing cold "out of the gate". Often the students would realize that they were having a problem and we would expand this section before we moved on. In a survey that I made of the students, this was actually the most popular part of the class (which surprised me initially).
Next, I did 5 minutes of "lecture". Keeping it to 5 minutes was almost impossible, but I got better over time. Then I did "circling". This is a technique where you make grammar constructions more visible through questioning. For example, "John is a brown dog", "Who is a brown dog?", "What is John?", "What colour is John?", "What kind of animal is John?", "Is John a goldfish?". I do a random walk through the students and make sure that everyone understands the day's concept. (For some reason I can't find a good link with a description of circling. It is originally a technique from TPRS if anyone is interested to search for themselves).
Finally, there is group practice. Essentially I made the students solve logic puzzles in English (I disguised them as "games", but it boils down to this). They were allowed to use any resource they wanted to in order to answer the questions (including asking me, asking their friends, looking up things in dictionaries, etc). I did not enforce an "English only" policy because these were very low level students who had self esteem issues, but I had a sheet with everybody's name on it and every time I heard someone use English to ask/answer a question I would give them bonus marks. This was essentially their "classroom participation" mark.
Another successful idea for the group work at the beginning of the year was to have a series of difficult questions. The students then had to write down the name of somebody in the class who knew the answer to the question (The game was called "find someone who knows"). The idea was to integrate the higher level students and make them a valuable resource for the lower level students. Generally speaking, the high level students usually want to impress, so they do things like answer all the questions put to them in English. This worked surprisingly well (though probably partly due to peculiarities with Japanese social systems).
I only got to touch the surface of this before my contract ran out. I decided to go back to being a programmer rather than pursue a career of teaching, but it was an eye opening experience. I couldn't believe the difference it made to stop concentrating on presenting material and start concentrating on my students. So instead of explaining things, I simply watched them try to figure it out for themselves, giving them advice from time to time.
Comments
It made me kind of sad when the British students preferred copying things from a chalkboard. I tried to implement a flipped classroom -- 15 minutes of "lecture" at the beginning, 25 minutes of group practice, 15 minutes of individual practice, then a 5 minute formative assessment/quiz -- when I taught chemistry in a low-income public high school in Mississippi. My students were really disoriented at first and preferred the less mentally-active work of copying notes or listening to a teacher... I actually had to tell them not to copy everything off my 15 minute presentations because they could just print it later or view it on their phones, and I'd rather they actively engage with the material. Many complained that they'd rather get a packet of notes to transcribe during class time.
The good news: by my second year of teaching, kids from the first year were telling their friends how a flipped classroom takes work away from studying notes and puts them into your classroom time. My students were more confident when they practiced concepts in class then assessed their own knowledge with a low-pressure quiz at the end of class. My second year I had students (and their parents) fighting to be in my chemistry classroom instead of a 30-year veteran's traditional classroom with 55 minutes of lecture.
Based on what we know about learning and cognition -- and with the way that the internet and mobile technology is de-emphasizing the need for memorized fact and emphasizing asking questions and performing creative problem solving -- I don't know why we're looking towards rote learning models to educate a 21st century workforce.
I don't know about your students but when I was in school copying things down was exactly how I engaged with the material. The act of transcription was how I remembered it -- I wouldn't even review the notes again later.
Is it really normal for American high school teachers to lecture for the entire period? No exercises, just note-taking?
I hazard to guess that the British students prefer copying things from a chalkboard because it's a novelty and requires considerably less effort than doing exercises. If they did it on a regular basis they'd quickly get bored.
It was when I was in High School. I used to alternate with a friend: one brings the notebook, one brings the pillow.
Pro Tip: Do not try the above in English class; many teachers will use subjectively graded assignments to punish you for sleeping through their lectures.
Depends on the class. History tends to have a lot of lectures. Science classes, math and English I don't recall as many (this was about 10 years ago). Also varies by teacher and I would assume school.
Math is probably the class that most easily follows this pattern: the teacher demonstrates how to solve a category of problem, the entire class practices it together with the teacher calling on students to provide answers, then after students are confidently solving the problem together they try to solve them independently -- a process that usually continues after class with homework problem sets.
Science classes in higher-income schools often follow this method too -- present a problem/question, introduce some bit of science knowledge, then investigate with a lab -- but low-income schools lack the resources to do lots of labs and as a result it's a lot of copying vocab/notes and doing problem sets that tend to be vocabulary-heavy.
Yeah, I think that sounds reasonable to me. I was thinking about my history classes more and there was a decent amount of interaction, just my memory about it was a bit fuzzy, since I haven't thought about the classes themselves in some years.
It had a decent amount of q/a and discussion, but it's rather hard to escape lectures in history. They didn't bother me though, since I had great history teachers that knew their stuff and made the lectures themselves interesting through anecdotes and personal experience. History was always my favorite subject, even though I obtained a degree in computer science.
I taught English for 5 years in Japan (even though completely unqualified... cough... cough...). In my last year I did something very similar. The thing that got me to change was that I started tracking how much time I spent 1-1 with each of my students. If you are lecture focussed, you end up spending mere minutes a year actually interacting with an individual student. I remember setting myself a goal of spending 10 minutes with each student every term (still woefully insufficient!!!) and realizing that it was impossible unless I radically changed the class structure.
I actually moved the assessment/quiz to the beginning of the class as a "review", followed by 5 minutes of questions. This allowed students to gauge how they were doing cold "out of the gate". Often the students would realize that they were having a problem and we would expand this section before we moved on. In a survey that I made of the students, this was actually the most popular part of the class (which surprised me initially).
Next, I did 5 minutes of "lecture". Keeping it to 5 minutes was almost impossible, but I got better over time. Then I did "circling". This is a technique where you make grammar constructions more visible through questioning. For example, "John is a brown dog", "Who is a brown dog?", "What is John?", "What colour is John?", "What kind of animal is John?", "Is John a goldfish?". I do a random walk through the students and make sure that everyone understands the day's concept. (For some reason I can't find a good link with a description of circling. It is originally a technique from TPRS if anyone is interested to search for themselves).
Finally, there is group practice. Essentially I made the students solve logic puzzles in English (I disguised them as "games", but it boils down to this). They were allowed to use any resource they wanted to in order to answer the questions (including asking me, asking their friends, looking up things in dictionaries, etc). I did not enforce an "English only" policy because these were very low level students who had self esteem issues, but I had a sheet with everybody's name on it and every time I heard someone use English to ask/answer a question I would give them bonus marks. This was essentially their "classroom participation" mark.
Another successful idea for the group work at the beginning of the year was to have a series of difficult questions. The students then had to write down the name of somebody in the class who knew the answer to the question (The game was called "find someone who knows"). The idea was to integrate the higher level students and make them a valuable resource for the lower level students. Generally speaking, the high level students usually want to impress, so they do things like answer all the questions put to them in English. This worked surprisingly well (though probably partly due to peculiarities with Japanese social systems).
I only got to touch the surface of this before my contract ran out. I decided to go back to being a programmer rather than pursue a career of teaching, but it was an eye opening experience. I couldn't believe the difference it made to stop concentrating on presenting material and start concentrating on my students. So instead of explaining things, I simply watched them try to figure it out for themselves, giving them advice from time to time.