What do We Teach

Teaching can be a little confusing at times. With so many parents, administration, government officials telling you what to teach and how to teach, it can get overwhelming. I think that keeping in mind these ideas can help any teacher decide how to go about in their classroom. One of the biggest things to understand about students is that they, "need opportunities to develop, understand, and apply important ideas" (Doubet & Hockett, 33). This means that what you teach has to be able to be used in multiple ways in your classroom. If you teach something that is one-level, for example you tell kids that dogs are mammals, then they have that information. That information doesn't do anything for them though because it has no surrounding knowledge. On the same token, if you teach kids how to distinguish between mammals and amphibians, they not only develop a schema, but also learn the skill of categorization. This is an example of another trait you should be teaching students which is knowledge and skills (Doubet & Hockett, 39-40). Teaching one without the other is only showing half the equation. As a teacher, you need to think about what do I want my students to leave the classroom knowing. Knowing what you want your students to have mastered when they finish your class is where the question of "what to teach" begins. Before knowing what you teach students, you must first, "focus on the desired learnings," i.e. the end goal (Backward Design, 2). With this end goal in mind, you can then space out and plan your lessons accordingly. You have to think critically about how you will help your students reach this goal. By giving our students, "clear purposes and explicit performance goals" (Backward Design, 5), we can lead them to success. As teachers, we can hold them to this standard we talked about at the beginning of the class; "You will learn x,y, and z" and they have that goal in mind the whole year.
In this way, you are bringing your teaching full circle. You start at the end and work backwards. With that end goal in mind, determining what to teach gets easier. You need to start broad and work small. As years pass, you will get better and better at teaching. We all learn from mistakes and achievements.