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TEACHING STYLE: A CAT OR A DOG?

TEACHING STYLE: A CAT OR A DOG?

TEACHING STYLE: A CAT OR A DOG?

 Tina Bacolas, a Technology coach, writes “Teaching style: Are you a cat or dog?”,where she reflects on the positive impact of lessons that foster deep learning experiences by:

teaching style

Teaching styles

Bacolas uses a famous YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq8nYgnE93Y ) 

to portray two styles of mentoring the young: a dog-like intervention, handholding and nurturing, followed by the straightforward, inconsiderate cat approach. 

She compares the cat manner with a Physics lesson she witnessed when doing peer observation at a high school in New Jersey, where students were told to design a lab experiment with nothing more than limited background information and a clear goal. The teacher monitored their work closely, guiding those who were lost back on track and encouraging those who were on the right path. After lots of hard work and finally overcoming the challenge, students not only learned the contents of the lesson, but also reached complex reasoning levels (High Order Thinking Skills - HOTS: analysis, synthesis and evaluation, in opposition to Low Order Thinking Skills - LOTS: remember, understand and apply, the levels in Bloom’s taxonomy). 

In the process, they developed some essential competencies required later in life as well.

Teaching in the Information Age

Bacolas points out that students nowadays have access to huge amounts of information, and what they do with it is a lot more important than the data itself. That is why she insists that Teacher Professional Development programs must be oriented towards the future, where information is available to anyone and in which people need to know: 

  1. how to think, 
  2. how to discern what is useful / positive from inconvenient / harmful, 
  3. how to collaborate, 
  4. how to communicate ideas assertively and 
  5. how to get things done.

Doing this doesn’t mean leaving content aside but encouraging gripping and provocative conversations among students WHILE covering those contents. 

At the end of the article, Bacolas mentions that she modeled a cat-like lesson to her peer teachers, asking them to find a solution to a problem, forcing them to communicate, research and collaborate. Her hope was to show them how to start designing more lessons that include age appropriate challenges for students to propose feasible solutions using the resources at hand. 

My guess is that, by writing and sharing this article, her hope was to plant a seed in us readers to replicate that effort in our own contexts. 

Let us try that at Anahuac Queretaro, shall we?

 

 

References:

Bacolas, Tina (2016). Teaching Style: Are you a cat or dog? Retrieved from 

http://www.teachmag.com/archives/8065

 

Bloom, B.S. (Ed.). Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H., Krathwohl, D.R. (1956). 

https://www.amazon.com/Taxonomy-Educational-Objectives-Handbook-vCognitive/dp/0582280109/bigdogsbowlofbis/ 

  • The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc.