Good Teaching: Does your child’s classroom have all three?

Good teaching has three different components: (a) content, (b) classroom management, and (c) implementation of content. I think that all three are absolutely necessary for a young child (or even a high school student for that matter) to gain the most from their year’s experience.  First, the content is the ‘what’ of teaching. It is information that has been agreed upon, usually by the school, the district, and sometimes the state. Each subsequent year builds upon the previous year’s content. It is the information that is to be conquered throughout the school year in order to prepare the child for the next. Second, children need to be pay attention and be involved with the content in order to learn. (Somersaulting on the carpet not allowed unless it’s P.E. or recess). When working in groups are children paying attention to the task at hand or are they talking about other things that do not apply to the lesson, playing with small objects, or kicking each other under the table (I’ve seen both happening in classrooms.)?

Finally, how a teacher teaches the information is based upon different theories and philosophies of instruction. This is where different methods come into play (I’m approaching ThirstForKnowledge’s question here. So, I haven’t forgotten you. Just takes a little time to provide a framework.). For instance, in reading, there are two primary methods of instruction. Now I’m going to reduce two philosophies of teaching to their simplest denominators.  One method focuses upon the teacher providing a model and the child doing what the teacher did (direct instruction). The other method is a teacher provides opportunities for children to discover and figure it out for themselves (constructivism).  Now that is really, really simplified. We’ll come back to these ideas at a later time.

The important thing to think about is that none of these features alone is a hallmark of a good classroom. It is the interplay of all three that makes a GREAT learning environment. How well the teacher keeps children on task allows opportunities for the children to learn the content. But conversely, if the content is irrelevant, no matter how well-behaved the children are, they won’t learn anything of significance.  Now, your challenge is to see if your child’s class has all three of these components in place? When you visit, take a look around.