On the student survey, we ask, “Was the way your teacher taught it different from your school?” While lecture is sometimes the most expedient way to get information into the students’ heads, we expect to see more than just lecture going on in GHP classes.<\/p>\n
That is not to scare you away from lecture completely. Some of GHP’s finest courses have been lecture courses. But on the whole, the rubric to remember is that if you feel as if you’re working too hard, it’s probably because you are. Use delivery models that put the burden of learning on the student: discovery, read and response, abstraction\/analysis\/synthesis, etc.<\/p>\n
As I observe you this summer, I do not necessarily need to see you standing and delivering. If I walk into your room and it looks as if you’re sitting in the corner doing nothing, that’s probably a good thing, as long as it’s obvious that the kids are deeply engaged and productive because of some switch you’ve flipped. One summer when I toured State School Superintendent Kathy Cox around the campus, in most of the classes we entered we didn’t see the teacher do<\/em> anything. And it was fabulous.<\/p>\n We also ask the students, “Was the way the teacher(s) asked you to respond to it different?” and “Was what the teacher(s) expected you to do with it different?”<\/p>\n What does that mean? As an example, in a regular math class the student might be expected to learn a paradigm for solving a particular kind of problem, and then to practice that paradigm. At GHP, the student might be expected to develop<\/em> a paradigm for solving a class of problems, or to be able to explain alternatives to the paradigm, or to create problems that would defeat the paradigm.<\/p>\n In music, rather than a goal of merely “getting all the notes right,” we could expect students to explore historically appropriate stylistic issues, or to be able to verbalize how their ensemble visualized a certain passage.<\/p>\n Ask yourself: when a student leaves my class, what should he be able to do that he wasn’t able to do before?<\/p>\n