At a PD session this week about co-teaching (from Tammy Baron at Western Carolina University), I noted that she often used the mode of defining through negation -- it's not x, it's not y or should not be doing x or not doing y. Co-teachers should add value to the classroom, they should not be HW help, they should not be 1:1 help, etc. In fact, 1:1 help could be disabling for kids.
I was puzzling out, by negation of the negations, what her definition of what "teaching" is -- it's modeling followed by group work followed by applying the learning. (I do, we do, you do). It's providing strategies, often scaffolded, that leads towards student independence.
What's NOT teaching? Providing a variety of graphic organizers is not teaching, providing a mnemonic for a strategy is not teaching; working with a student to apply a graphic organizer, with the intention of reducing the scaffolded help, is.
I learned about "forward chaining" (and similarly backward chaining - which is the video above). Think of 8 steps of tying shoes. The best part (the fun part) is pulling the bows at the end. So, your first time teaching a student that is that you model all the first 7 steps, and let the student complete the bow. The next time you do 6 steps and the student does the last 2 steps. In the meantime you're modeling the process again and again.
The big question for the day is whether "teaching" in general is about providing strategies so that a student builds independence. It's not about filling a mind nor lighting a fire, but providing a bunch of tools for a toolbox that a student can use.
In my case, the tools are for interpretation of information dense texts (poems, novels, prose) and composition.
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