Teaching for Tomorrow
McCain's Points for Teaching Content and Problem-Solving
We must resist the temptation to "tell."
Stop talking at your students, it is not engaging. Telling your students takes the excitement and discovery out of learning.
We must stop teaching decontextualized content.
The context of real world scenarios helps students remember specific details and gives information meaning.
We must stop giving students the final product of our thinking.
Teaching is ineffective when all the thinking and learning done by the instructor is done behind closed doors. Show students your thinking and learning, including every step that you take to solve a problem and any mistakes that you encounter.
We must make a fundamental shift-problems first, teaching second.
Real-world problems do not come with the task neatly outlined on a sheet of paper. We should teach students how to problem solve for real-world situations so that our students are prepared for what they will be subjected to after school.
We must progressively withdraw from helping students.
We need to foster independence in our students and help them to learn that it is ok to make mistakes and not be afraid of failing.
We must reevaluate evaluation.
We need to stop teaching to the test and make things important to our students so they don't forget what they learned for that specific test. Instead of constantly testing students, come up with real-world work tasks for them to complete to illustrate their learning.