Prensky focused chapter 5 on planning for a partnering classroom by using questions to guide the curriculum. According to Prensky (2010), the best way to plan for partnering is by focusing on what questions you can ask students instead of what you can tell them. These questions need to be overarching questions that don’t have one right answer, preferably starting with “why” and able to be followed up with “how”. The best guiding questions, says Prensky (2010), are those that cause students to say, “That’s a good question!” and lead them to take action in the real world.
This method of asking students to find the answer to a complicated question intrigues me. It would definitely place learning in a student’s hands, and I think as a student I would have been positively giddy at the chance to discover information instead of sitting bored while someone told it to me. However, this chapter really brought to light a concern I’ve had with the partnering approach since the beginning: how well would this work for students with disabilities? Many students with intellectual disabilities wouldn’t be able to understand more abstract guiding questions, and they wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get the answers. They would need a lot of guidance from a teacher and their work would need to be much, much more organized than other students’. Direct instruction is often lauded as the preferred method of teaching skills to students with intellectual and other disabilities, and this approach is about as far away from that as possible. In addition, students with ADHD, Asperger Syndrome, autism, or other disorders may find it difficult to function in classes that are less structured, more unpredictable, and often noisy. I value the possibilities that partnering instruction offers, and I love the idea of using guiding questions instead of lecturing at kids, but I wonder about its usefulness as we see an increase in inclusion. I think with heavy modifications it could work for most students, but would it be the best way for all of them to learn?
Prensky does acknowledge that most every student will need assistance in connecting their work to what they are learning how to do. Utilizing guiding questions does not guarantee that students will be able to connect everything on their own, and it is important that kids recognize they are acquiring skills, not just information. To remedy this, teachers must explicitly state the connection between a student’s work and the learned skills (Prensky, 2010). This reminds me of writing analytical papers for my English degree. Just because I understood how a certain paragraph fit with my thesis didn’t mean that someone else saw the connection. I always had to be careful to relate every point back to the idea I was trying to prove. I would often even put my thesis on a sticky note attached to my computer so that I could refer back to it when crafting each paragraph. In the classroom, teachers must point out that doing a certain task is teaching the student a certain thing. This might even be reflected in an objective that is shared with the class each day. For example, if I am teaching the students to analyze poetry by identifying similes and metaphors, I may write on the board that our objective is to “analyze poetry through the identification of similes and metaphors.” Our students are smart, but we need to make certain things perfectly clear so they don’t get lost.
Image from ReadWriteWeb.com
In Kindle news, Amazon announced this week that they are adding page numbers to the Kindle—and my first thought was, “It’s about time!” I first read about it in the New York Times article here. Interestingly, the article also mentions the advent of the public highlight feature that they supposedly already had but hasn’t been working for our class for weeks. When I signed in to the page today, I noticed that the interface was difference, but I didn’t notice an abundance of public highlights suddenly showing up. I’ll believe that feature exists when I see it actually working, Amazon! But thanks for the page numbers.
Prensky, Mark. (2010). Teaching digital natives: partnering for real learning (Kindle ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Highlights and notes made public by readers of this book can (hopefully) be viewed here.
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