T: Teachable Moments (ES)

Teachable Moments

It was March 15, 2001 and all students were off from school for Curriculum Development Conference Day for teachers. We all gathered in the auditorium of the high school for the keynote speaker, Dr. Steven Sobel,  a motivational speaker, educator, and humorist. During his speech he said, “A lot of kids won’t tell you, this is the day that you can reach me.” I was into writing down quotes back then, so I wrote it down. I don’t remember what Dr. Sobel talked about on that day, but the quote has stuck with me for all of my teaching since then.

Every day teachers, parents, and even children go into the world with the hopes that we will be able to learn something new and share some of our knowledge with others so they can learn also. Just ask my son how many different types of video games and animé he has tried to teach me about throughout his pre-adolescence through young adulthood. It’s not an easy task.

As a teacher when you have a class of students that are all over the place – socially, cognitively, and behaviorally, in addition to whatever baggage they are bringing to the day from home, you try to find a middle ground that you hope teaches the skills that you have in your plans to everyone. With Common Core and testing that push to accomplish so much in so little time, it becomes an even bigger task. There’s not as much time to find those teachable moments with individuals as you are trying to push everyone along.

In my early years of teaching, I teamed with another teacher and we both taught 4th and 5th grade interage classrooms. That meant we kept most students for 2 years (our 4th grades to 5th graders) As fifth graders left our classes a new set of 4th graders entered. It allowed us a lot of flexibility. We could split the classes such that one of us taught all the 4th graders social studies or science and the other taught all the 5th graders. We could combine both classes and then divide the students into more homogeneous groups based on skill level. We did that with reading also. This allowed us to not be restricted by grade level, but deal with the students on their cognitive level. You can’t do that today. Each year we decided who would teach which groups so that we didn’t stagnate teaching the same thing all of the time. What was nice about this system was when one of us would come across a 4th grader who was struggling with a particular concept such as in math, we realized that that wasn’t the time to teach them, so we could say, “Don’t worry about it, you’ll learn this concept next year”.

Finding a teachable moment and method sometimes gave us small victories. I’ve written about a few of those small victories in older blogs. You can read them by first going to: http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=271 and following the links to the other two when you’re done reading.

We all must be keenly aware of our audience as we try to teach and share experiences. Our children don’t always see the wisdom of what we are trying to teach them when they are young, but slowly as they grow older they discover we’re not stupid anymore. We as adults follow the same pattern as we learn from our children. Being able to recognize “this is the day you can teach me” is a crucial skill to being an effective teacher. So keep a look out for it.