Deep and wide…
February 25, 2008 by alicemercer
First, interesting discussion in the comments for this post, » Reason #6 Why We Need To Teach Real Science Again In At Risk Schools In Practice:
Alice Mercer:
Sad, see these new readers have units that are about science and about social studies, but they really seem to teach those subjects using the polka dot method. This is where you paint a wall not with a roller (which covers everything) but in a series of dots, where not everything gets covered.
Brian Crosby
Yes – or the Blanket Method … where you cover EVERYTHING so nothing gets uncovered and discovered.
Brian
Then a great post on Teaching For Depth vs. Breadth « The Elementary Educator which discusses what happens when you have too many standards, learning objectives to cover (and students end up sometimes knowing less than they did before you taught them).
Why do we want it all? We want language arts and science, so we shove science curriculum into language arts readers (but not effectively). We want to make sure that it “all” gets covered, so we have these standards that are as wide as the Mississippi, but get taught at the depth of the puddle in my backyard. Could less, be more?
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
I don’t see a problem with putting science in the language arts textbooks as I think the most effective teaching would be an integrated curriculum where you study fossils (or whatever) and relate it to math, social studies, geography, language arts, and of course science.
However, many administrators and teachers stop at the language arts textbook and don’t bring any other subject areas or teach the unit in any more depth than the few stories in the text.
Also, sometimes we assume that because it’s in the mandated text that it’s a standard. Fossils and camouflage are in the second grade reader but the standards are broader and richer like animal adaptation and how life has changed from long ago to now, I believe.
If you teach to the standards, then you relate the language arts text to those standards rather than the other way around. The standards in this case give you license to include additional material and investigation in your units that isn’t there if you stop where the basal ends.
[Reply]