Last Wednesday was the first day back for teachers in my district. Our students come back the Tuesday after Labor Day. I've been in this district for 3 years, and, call me strange, but I actually enjoy the way that my district structures the professional development. We spend several days in our school, and have 2 or 3 days where we have some sessions that we can choose from. This year, I have 2 sessions I'm particularly looking forward to: one is Connecting Generations, which explores (and hopefully gives us pieces of!) the new curriculum that deals with the Holocaust from USC Shoah Foundation, and the other is with John Golden, the author of 'Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and other Nonfiction Texts. I'm excited about both of them because they reflect how I teach.
Last Saturday, I also attended the required training session for new Precision Teachers. I wish I were as excited about Precision Teaching as I am about the possibilities for the other two sessions.
The facilitator for our Precision Teaching training described it as an intervention that can be used to teach any kind of information. People who are familiar with the traditional ABA and TEACCH programs used with children with autism will recognize a lot of similarities in Precision Teaching. I won't insult anybody by saying the program is bad, and doesn't work: it does work, and works very well for some students. Our facilitator described Precision Teaching as one of her passions, and I respect that. How could I not, given that I often feel like I'm the odd one out in what I believe and in how I teach?
To continue this thought: I was surfing the web earlier this evening and looking at various materials, resources and comments for Precision Teaching. I found a lot of sites for worksheets and ways to make new worksheets, including a technology tool that I've used for years, and absolutely love: Schoolhouse Technologies worksheet generators. I've been using their products forever, and have participated in many beta testing sessions. You can even find a few of my word lists here.
But, there wasn't a whole lot in the list that excited me, and I was really worried by a few of the things I read, including a video I saw about various math education methods. There are always people who are more enthusiastic about things than others, so I need to remind myself to take some of what I saw with a grain of salt.
But, after I stopped looking at Precision Teaching materials, I went looking for something that was more, well, me. It didn't take me long to find what I was looking for in a blog attached to WOW2.0.
The very first blog I read discussed using a podcast from Business Week about the future of employment and jobs. It explained that students need to understand why we want them to learn and use something, and how it fits into the real world. It seemed to insist on problem solving as a method (something a few of the more evangelistic Precision Teaching sites decried as really, really bad). This, clearly, is one of my passions...
So, how do I meet the requirement for 50% of my job this year, which requires precision teaching, and still be a teacher that integrates technology, web 2.0, and creativity? I have to do 3 periods of precision teaching, which only leaves me 2 periods of other kinds of teaching. Suggestions are welcome...
4 months ago
3 comments:
Hi -
The Precision Teaching community is quite varied, methodologically, politically and philosophically, and you will certainly find many who use problem-solving teaching strategies with their students. The main point of PT is tracking learning, and finding a way to indicate learning with something countable. That actually can require some real creativity - it's not cut and dried; while it could be something mundane like words read aloud per minute, it can also be somedthing like "ideas recalled from a story in five minutes". It could be number of questions asked by the classroom in an hour. Whoever is teaching you might present it as a cut and dried process, but that is often how new things are taught on a large scale within an organization (unfortunately). I learned about your blog from somebody on our PT website, and I'm going to encourage other members to post their ideas to you (I'm a novice, so not your best source). They are all very "big on" having the learner make choices, express preferences, and enjoy learning. You might enjoy going to the website for Morningside Academy in Seattle, WA, and also the website for Fabrizio/Moors Consulting. I think Ben Bronz Academy also has a website. These are the "primo" Precision Teaching sites, and their founders and teachers are very creative and very much into having students understand the why and not just the what of learning.
Greetings,
I appreciate your PT post & call for help. I'm also a SpEd teacher & have found PT to be the most adaptable & useful assessment tool. You can use PT to assess practically anything educational. For example, you can use it with your IntelliTools program. Just figure out your kid's objective, figure out the time involved and the successful and/or unsuccessful complete desired behaviors ['movement cycles' in the lingo] & bingo...you've got a data point. Spend the rest of the time teaching.
Across just a few days, you can see if your student is "getting it". Really...with just a little assessment you can get a LOT of information relevant to that particular kid.
I don't know how PT was described to you...but it is only an assessment tool. It is an extremely powerful tool and you can adjust the sensitivity by deciding what you want to measure.
Do your thing. Let the chart serve YOU in choosing how to proceed with your students' programs.
I will be very surprised if you're not as pleased with the results as I am.
Have a wonderful new year,
mybhl [I don't know how to send you this without publishing it.]
You can get a little help with Precision Teaching if you join the SClistserv at http://lists.psu.edu. The new celeration.org website, still very much under development, encourages visitors to register. How well the will work is as yet unknown, but it should, in time, help greatly to keep the PT community together and helping one another.
There is, Magi, at least one interesting and joyful PT person in the Washington, D.C. area, who is raising an autistic child, and uses PT effectively. I do not have her permission to advertise her name and address, but you could ask for Shooz at celeration.org and get my email address, and then we might proceed from there, to see what can be done to assist you this year, so that PT doesn't turn into something that seems like a drag.
----Yrz, Shooz
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