1.Teach to MULTIPLE Intelligences
Not that long ago, wise educational administration guided teachers to balance, with rhythmic movement and artistic self-expression, the intellectual instruction they were giving their children .
Teaching required us to be more physical, more creative, more emotionally expressive than how we teach today.
During the time my generation was coming into the profession in the late 1960’s, every elementary education major graduating Queens College had to know how to play simple songs on the piano and recorder.
We learned how to teach for an instructional environment where teachers were still singing with their classes, reciting poetry, teaching basic art lessons, directing plays, and getting their students to perform on stage for regular assemblies.
For generations, this was the range of activities required of the personality of an elementary school teacher.
Your students would also have had Shop or Sewing where they made little pot holders and knick-knack shelves, demonstrating the virtue of working with their hands.
The choral reading of poetry and vigorous vocal recitations, led by your teacher, were once standard practice in the American classroom.
Young children could listen to and imitate the well-articulated human dramatic voices and the earnest human singing voices of their teachers.
2. Back to Basics
So sing with your students, draw with them, make murals together, act out stories, dance and exercise with them, read to them— dramatically. Ham it up!
That’s how you will save American Public Education.
Breathe life into your instruction— YOUR life.
If you knit, weave wool into your curriculum. If you practice Tai Chi, bring movement and concentration into your syllabus. Appeal to your children’s heartfelt desire to serve by engaging them in Community Service Learning activities.
Dare to take the time to balance the analytical instruction you give your students with activities appealing to their other intelligences as well.
Giving more of yourself does not mean more of your time spent correcting student work, or doing administrative paperwork, or in helping kids prepare for their next test after or before school hours.
Giving more of yourself is a spiritual demand.
You choose to expand how much of yourself you are willing to express to your students, and you choose how much of themselves you want to draw out of them.
Amy Valens, in August to June, documents a public school teacher, with her community, engaged in teaching the Whole Child.
And if you cannot be wholeheartedly engaged with what you are teaching them— skip it, miniaturize it, trash it, postpone it indefinitely, or get another job.
As you consider the consequences of the Data and Numbers Accountability promoted by your school, take a great leap of faith— if you create an instructional culture in your classroom by enlivening, awakening, and imaginatively stimulating your students— supporting a variety of ways they will express themselves, then your students will do better on any test that you give them.
They will be motivated.
How could teaching children from your spirit be less successful than teaching to the test in a cut and dry, lifeless manner?
You will not be having to offer crass incentives and empty promises of better-paying jobs in the future if you teach children by motivating them for the present.
In writing a Guerrilla lesson plan, you constantly are asking yourself, What are the children doing?
Do most of their activities involve left-brain functions? How much of what you say to them uses explaining language?
If your students’ only opportunity for physical activity is to write at their desks or to raise their hands to answer a question, then ask yourself how you can bring their other intelligences into play.
Young people have limbs, voices and a volition to move.
Does your lesson plan consider what the physical and vocal output is for the kids?
3. Practice Guerrilla Literacy
“A work of mystical fancy does not call upon the emotions of the reader merely for the pleasure the child often finds in such reading, but because the author believes that the emotions are essential in helping the child intuitively grasp that kind of knowledge which is unattainable through the ordinary corridors of reason alone.”
Beyond Words: Mystical Fancy in Children’s Literature by James E. Higgins
Teaching children vocabulary words, background information, comprehension skills (especially guided by Bloom’s Taxonomy), character development, author’s purpose, & etc. are all necessary, but they only exercise a child’s cognitive intelligence.
Most of why we teach Literature has to do with all the other forces of comprehension.
Doesn’t Norman Rockwell, as usual, hit the nail on the head with his illustration, Lands of Enchantment?
Through Literature, we offer children the opportunity to imagine themselves in fantasy situations. We give them characters to identify with and circumstances they couldn’t even imagine on their own. We guide them in how our decisions and our values affect the course of our lives. We study characters who are challenged to be true to themselves. We look at life as an adventure, a journey, a comedy and drama.
We encourage our kids to meta-cogitate about the stories we give them so that they may acquire the inclination to meta-cogitate about themselves in their own lives.
Teach for cognitive thinking skills when you use stories for instruction, of course— but for Heaven’s sake, keep your intentions for instruction to the ideals, the models, the truths, the life’s lessons, the emotions, the big pictures, the delicious language of the Literature you are using.
If your reading matter has very little of all that, then dump it and find more challenging, high fiber stuff.
Don’t get lost in the Left Brain frenzy stirred up by Reading tests. Steadfastly attend to the historical purpose of why we teach Literature. That purpose is the same as it was during our pre-literate days.
Teaching Literature transcends reading and writing acquisition.
You follow in the tradition of the storyteller by the crackling fire.
Your purpose is to open wide with wonder the eyes of your audience!