Expansive Teaching

1 thought on “Expansive Teaching”

1. Ben Slavic

   April 10, 2017 at 2:05 pm

   John Piazza, a relentless advocate at Berkeley High School in California for equity in the teaching of Latin, has addressed this topic:

   …students can smell a rat, the rat being our agenda for them, our targets and scope and sequence, and our stories which are only there for exposing students to our target words. Before one of my classes, I heard about a kid from a rival school who insulted some of my students at a football game. Guess what? That brat became the center of our story that day, and lots of insults flew….

   “In another class, I learned that one student had given a big birthday party over the summer, but that not everyone in our class was invited. But one of the non-invitees had a party of his own. That became the story for that class.

   “I just always remind myself that student interest is much more important than rushing into something that the students won’t connect with, like some word they don’t care about on that day.”

   John and I are not alone in this position. Many teachers are starting to dive deep into the comprehensible input ocean without flotation devices and are finding to their surprise that they are much better swimmers than they thought they were, and their strokes are longer and surer and stronger, and they can swim farther without tiring.

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