Teaching Tip #43

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #43

Here is a blog post with a title that I just couldn’t resist clicking on:  9 Elephants in the (Class)Room That Should “Unsettle” Us by one of my favorite people in education, Will Richardson.

Elephant #7 – We know that separating learning into discrete subjects and time blocks is not the best way to prepare kids for the real world.

This one is the contention of James Burke all the way.  His argument is that school is a game constructed to put learning into “boxes” simply to make it easier for teachers to teach.

I’m not sure how I feel about this, but when I coached football, I didn’t have one practice that focused totally on the history of the game.  Then I didn’t have a practice focusing just on conditioning and another practice just on the offensive scheme and so on.

So little of our world works the way learning in school does.