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Fundamental Laws of TeachOlogy:
a Handbook For a Beginner
Teacher
Every road has its beginning.
Every evolution has stages and phases.
The birth of a knowledgeable and skillful human follows
specific laws, like the birth of a human.
Skipping those stages is impossible.
Alternating those stages will lead to “birth defects”.
That is why we need to know the basic laws of TeachOlogy, so we could fulfill the mission of K12
education!
6th
Teaching is
guiding students through an arrangement of learning experiences specifically
designed for helping students with mastering the subject, including
understanding the topics, developing skills, and feeling good about themselves.
7th
Teaching = motivating + demonstrating + instructing + explaining
Learning = goal making + memorizing + reiterating
+ thinking
Understanding = making
sense of the things by connecting the current experience with the previous
knowledge, and – if needed – modifying the previous knowledge, or re-describing
the current experience.
8th
If a person
can learn the multiplication table and the strategy for solving a quadratic
equation, that person can learn any high level intellectual knowledge (e.g.
quantum gravitation), and there are only two reasons for that not happening -
no desire, or a wrong teacher.
9th
If the only
exercise students had been doing for 12 years is squats, they will not be good
at push-ups and pull-ups. Do not expect from students an ability to think if
all the had to do for 12 years was memorizing facts and rules.
10th
True
learning never happens by watching, it happens by doing.
You can
watch for hours other people swimming, but if you want to learn how to swim you
have to get yourself into water and start trying.
Reading (and
watching, and listening) helps to form an initial vocabulary, and to set
relationships between the current knowledge and the upcoming one. Doing
(speaking, writing, solving, explaining) forms the skills.
11th
The
“learning space” of students in a class is (essentially) three dimensional:
students might differ by their 1. background (previously learned knowledge and
skills); 2. learnability (rate and volume of attaining knowledge and skills as
a function of time and effort); 3. motivation (aspirations and willingness to
learn).
A good
teacher always can provide a reason for his/her actions. Sometime it is "I
just felt like doing this". But for a good teacher that does not happen
very often.
12th
Kids do not
know anything and learn everything from scratch. When adults learn new skills,
they repeat the same general steps and stages of learning they used to use when
where learning as kids (but usually/hopefully faster).
13th
Look at
infants – they always try doing new things and want to learn something new! Now
look at school graduates – so many of them do not want to learn anything new. A
facility which does this to students cannot be called “a school”.
14th
The best
gift a parent can give to a child is good habits; the best gift a teacher can
give to a student is love for learning and confidence in ability to learn.
The most
important social ability and a habit parents and teachers can give to children
is fighting the temptation for instant gratification.
The art of
teaching is based on the science of learning, the love for education, and the
passion for sharing this love.
15th
Everybody
can drive, but not everyone is a good driver, everybody can cook, but not
everyone is a chef. Anyone can talk, but it is wrong to think that anybody can
be a good teacher.
A great
teacher is not the one who just loves teaching, but the one who loves learning
and is passionate in sharing this love.
If you are a
good teacher, your students understand your way of thinking and copy what you
do. If you are a great teacher, your students can generate their own ideas and
do things impossible to you.
For example
– for a physics or math teacher.
If you are a
good teacher, your students understand your solutions to problems, if you are a
great teacher, your students generate their own solutions.
16th
Teachers –
like doctors – must take “a Hippocratic Oath” of a teacher. i.e. to promise
“never do harm to anyone”, because there is always something more important in
teaching than merely transmitting knowledge.
If a person
does not like a challenge and does not like learning, that person should not go
into the business of education in any form; she.he is not going to be a good teacher, or
administrator, or a researcher in the field.
17th
There are
three kinds of human practices/projects with the goal of advancing human life:
(a) scientific research - with the goal of discovering new patterns which can
be used for making reliable predictions; (b) engineering and art - with the
goal of developing and building new devices (and systems of devices), or
developing artifacts of art; (c) social advancement - with the goal of a social
advancement, developing or adopting new collective practice(s) (new - for the
given social group, but may have been used already by other people).
Education
combines all three.
18th
Every human
practice has some elements of a scientific research: when we start a project,
we generally have some understanding of what we want to achieve and how we want
to achieve that (“a hypothesis”), and how will we assess (measure) how close we
are to the goal (“facts”).
The
difference between a scientific research and a social project is in “what
utilizes what”.
In a
scientific research, some social activity is being used as a vehicle to obtain
new knowledge. In that case, some advancement in some social practice
represents a “collateral” result of the research.
In a social
project, some scientific knowledge is being used to achieve positive changes in
a certain social situation. In this case, some newly recorded knowledge
represents a “collateral” result of the project.
19th
Physics
represents the most developed scientific approach to study the Nature. When a
physicist is trying to understand how the Nature works, he/she uses a scientific
approach based on clear and uniformly used terminology, and on well-defined and
uniformly used measuring tools and procedures. Everyone who teaches science has
to use the same scientific approach. Everyone who teaches how to teach
science has to use the same scientific approach.
20th
The main goal of education
is equipping students with the ability to succeed in life. The highest level of
education is achieved when students can create solutions to problems they have
never solved before.
Since the
solution has to be constructed, a student most probably will be making
mistakes.
True
(actual, full, complete) learning cannot happen without making mistakes.
Mistakes are inevitable and unavoidable.
There is no shame in making a mistake.
There is
shame, though, in insisting that you didn't, when even you already know that
you did.
A culture
where mistake are being punished cannot
succeed in Science, Technologies, Engineering, and Mathematics (and
intellectually in general; but, keep in mind, that "grading" is not
necessary "punishment").
This is just
a fact, that the same assignments (e.g. physics problems)
may be too easy for some students and too difficult for
other students. In both cases the learning is not
happening, because a student did not have to learn anything, or could
not learn anything. Hence, when designing teaching practice, a teacher has to
manage the difficulty of the assignments - for
all students - making assignment not too easy and not too hard, i.e.
placing them in the Zone of
Proximal Development of the students.
21th
People who
praise the Socratic method should
keep in mind how he ended his life.
For
Socrates, knowledge a person has, defines that person as a whole. When Socrates
said: “I know that I know nothing” he did not just accept limits of his
knowledge, he accepted his limits as a human being. Unfortunately, expecting
the same from others had lead Socrates to willingly drinking poison.
Click here For more on the Socratic Method
Appendix: On a definition of “a law” and “a science”
I) What is
“a law”?
A law is a
statement of an existing pattern. This statement usually has a verbal or a
mathematical representation.
II) What
does a law do?
A law allows
to explain observed phenomena. But the most important application of a law is
to predicting events. A law allows to make a statement about (a) what events
will be possible for happening (within given limits, under given circumstances,
within a given timeframe), and (b) among possible events, what is a chance for
a given event to happen.
III) What is
“a science”?
The
definition of a science is multi-dimensional.
(a) A
science is an internally consistent body of knowledge based on the scrupulous
and logical analysis of a vast amount of data.
(b) A
science is a specific human practice which mission is to obtain and describe
natural and social patterns (a.k.a. laws) in order to use those patterns for
making reliable predictions.
(shortly:
the mission of a science is making predictions; if making reliable predictions
is not yet possible, the field is still in a pre-science stage)
(c) The
development of a science usually has two stages:
1) a
pre-science stage, when the main goals of human activities are:
* developing
a language (mainly naming objects and processes), tools and procedures
(including specifically designed experiments) for collecting and classifying
data, and
* collecting
and classifying data, and
*
formulating the set of patterns describing the phenomena within a specific
domain
2) a
science stage, when the main goals of human activities are:
* using the
developed set of patterns for improving human living, and
* using the
developed set of patterns for advancing the science
Avery human
practice presents a certain combination of pre-scientific activities,
scientific activities, art, engineering, and chaotic trials. The activity which
dominates the practice gives the name to the practice.
Thank you
for visiting,
Dr. Valentin
Voroshilov
Education
Advancement Professionals
To learn
more about my professional experience:
"The Backpack Full of Cahs": pointing at a problem, not offering a solution
Essentials of Teaching Science
BTW: A
Teacher is the Manager of the Class!
© 2006 -
2018 Valentin Voroshilov
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