A New Perspective

For the past ten weeks, I have been busy completing my first quarter as a graduate student. These past weeks have provided me an opportunity to see teaching and learning from a student's perspective. What have I learned from my new role as a student?

1.) Constant and consistent feedback is crucial.
2.) Developing critical thinking skills are extremely valuable.
3.) Clear expectations about course objectives and necessary skills are imperative.
4.) Teach the material, not the book.
5.) Love what you preach and teach.
6.) Frequent assessment of knowledge helps students retain material.


Along with reading The Differentiated Classroom and researching Communities of Practice, I started perusing through Classroom Instruction that Works by Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. The focus of their book is to provide research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. The first chapter covers the instructional strategy of identifying similarities and differences. This past quarter, one of my professors constantly told us to focus on beginning points, commonalities, and simplicity. Every week, he would have us write short essays on certain topics. First, we would have identify how these two subjects are alike and then explore their differences. I like his commonality approach, as I realized that too often we just focus on how things are different. Nonetheless, drawing comparisons through identifying similarities and differences has been found to be basic to human thought. Making these connections are considered to be the "core of all learning." The following are four generalizations Marzano and his colleagues were able to conclude from their research on the impact of identifying similarities and differences, as an instructional strategy, on student achievement:
1.) Presenting students with explicit guidance in identifying similarities and differences enhances students' understanding of and ability to use knowledge.
2.) Asking students to independently identify similarities and differences enhances students' understanding of and ability to use knowledge.
3.) Representing similarities and differences in a graphic or symbolic form enhances students' understanding of and ability to use knowledge.
4.) Identification of similarities and differences can be accomplished in a variety of ways: Comparing, Classifying, Creating metaphors, Creating analogies.

For examples of specific ideas applicable to your class, templates, and /or samples for identifying similarities and differences please come by my office or email me and I can come to you. From my own perspective as a student, this strategy works and fosters a level of thinking that promotes linking ideas and retaining information.