The Teacher’s Job is to Explain— To “Make Plain”
I have made the claim before that a teacher is essentially an “explainer.” I’ve sometimes felt some resistance from others to that claim, and I think I know why. When I state that a teacher is an “explainer,” for some it conjurers up an image of a dry, boring lecture such as the case of the economics teacher (played by Ben Stein) in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (“anyone, anyone…”). This is not my idea of an “explainer,” so let me try to “explain” my claim below.
Coaching Track & Field as a Model of Differentiated Instruction
For a number of years while I was teaching at ICS in Ethiopia, I was the high school track & field coach. I loved coaching; the new track & field season was something I looked forward to each year. As a teacher, I knew that what I was doing as a track & field coach was a model of differentiation, but I struggled to then translate that into differentiated learning in my classroom. This past semester I took a course called "Differentiating Instruction." I felt a little validated when differentiation guru Carol Ann Tomlinson also made the connection between good coaching and differentiated classroom teaching.