To spoon-feed or not to spoon-feed?
This is a recurring question come lesson planning time.
Do I want to honor students' inherent intelligence by designing a free-form project or do I want to make airplane noises as I feed them explicit instructions? After being a victim of my own disastrous projects, I've learned that it is better to give a clear picture of my expectations rather than to trust students' creative liberties.
Case in point-this is the first time that I've offered such scaffolding to my annual movie project.
(Note the sentence starters in addition to little symbols)
Giving them sentence starters like this really made me doubt the academic rigor of my projects. If the other 7th grade English teachers strolled into my room, I would've furiously erased such traces of babying my students. However, I have to say that students scored higher on their movie projects this year than any other previous years.
Even if I had helped them step by step, the end result is all theirs, and I'm really proud of their work. They also seem extremely happy, so if they're happy and I'm happy, then maybe this spoon-feeding isn't such a bad thing after all.
I remember 7th grade as a time of extremely explicit instructions - with the possible exception of math, that was a farce - and if you missed one small detail (that was extremely important), you got a D. Which I got. On my first paper.
ReplyDeleteSo...spoon-feeding is good? (I've discovered that my anecdotes often are roads to nowhere. Take this as you will, haha.)
Spoon-feeding is necessary sometimes! It looks like they still had plenty of creative freedom in movie choice, so I give you credit! :)
ReplyDeleteKelly (your fellow Minnesotan teacher friend)