Chapter Five

I know the bulk of the chapter was about the different taxonomies, and learning to engage the students senses, but I've had all that before. So I wanted to focus on the aspects of the chapter that were new to me. I'd never really seen curriculum broken down to that degree. It's one of those things I had always just assumed was "what we teach." Turns out, there's a lot more to it than that. One thing that I really found interesting was the differences between overt and covert learning. Not because it was new and fascinating, but because it was something I had never really considered.

Think about it: how do we know if our students truly understand something? We can ask them questions to try and wring some information out of them, but is that just knowing, or is that actual understanding? What is understanding anyway? There are a lot of movies I've seen that I could explain to you, but that doesn't mean I understood them at all. It's hard to find that line, and I'm not sure that it will always be obvious. It's true that our assessments should be designed to pinpoint these various levels of grasp, but I don't know how well I'll be able to do that early on. It'll take time, but I'm sure we can get there with a little help.

Which brings me to my next point: getting help. I love that the authors encourage collaboration between teachers, and even between subjects! Most textbooks have encouraged us to find a mentor in the school while we are still educational saplings, but never have they spent as much time on collaboration like Mr. and Mrs. Kellough. I think this is incredibly important, and it's one of the first pieces of advice I got my from CT when I was novice teaching; always collaborate! He would even try to work in the vocabulary words from their Language Arts class into the History lessons just so students could hear them more often and associate new meaning. It was a brilliant move, but it was also a great example of how teachers in different specialties can work together to help each other.