How Did the Book Start?

Joe:
Dr. Nebel, how did your interest in environmental science lead you you to write a book suitable for elementary kids?

Dr.Nebel:
Environmental science builds and draws upon some understanding of all the sciences and other subjects such as economics and government as well. This project really came from my increasing dismay regarding the lack of that foundational knowledge displayed by most of my entry level college students, information they should have acquired in elementary school, to say nothing of high school.

I decided to undertake my own examination lower level education to find the shortcomings and, to my mind, they were blatant. The typical elementary curriculum has become fragmented into independent, stand-alone units, especially in science. This is a recipe for forgetting, not learning. Without systematically putting each lesson to use as a stepping stone to the next and constantly integrating and applying what is being learned, the lessons are simply forgotten. In short, I brought my "holistic" knowledge gained through my career in environmental science together with my avocation of working with younger children and appreciating the learning process to develop this curriculum that uniquely builds and integrates all subjects and skills into a child-centered, continuum of learning.

How is the book organized?

Joe:
Can you tell me a bit on how you organized the book?

Dr.Nebel:
It has lessons, including hundreds of hands-on exercises, are logically compiled and integrated in a thematic manner that will lead children too a broad, solid foundational understanding in all subject areas as well as mastery of reading, writing, numerical, and critical thinking skills. At the same time, its child-centered, flexible approach promises to foster the love of learning.

Joe:
Dr. Nebel thank you for being with us today.
In the next section, Dr. Nebel shares us a portion of his book which tell us about different strategies for teaching that we can apply at home.

"Teaching Strategies"

Excerpted from Chapter 1: Nebel's Elementary Education
Reprinted with the permission of the author. May not be reproduced without the expressed written permission of the author. © 2001 All rights reserved

All teaching is necessarily a two-sided process. One side is the material to be presented; the other side is the methodology of presentation. It is self-evident that both the subject matter and the presentation strategy must be appropriate and in harmony for learning to occur. If information is lacking or beyond the students' ability to comprehend, learning will obviously not occur. Likewise, an inappropriate method of presentation will thwart learning even if the material is appropriate. The bulk of this book is devoted to presenting information in a sequence that will lead to structured learning.

In this chapter, however, I focus on teaching methodology; techniques that will invariably come into play throughout the process. Professional educators have been prone to advocate that one single methodology is best and that all lessons, as far as possible, should be designed using that methodology.

A single-best-method approach is not my position. A craft person has an array of different tools, each for a specific part of the job. A good part of their skill is in selecting and using the tool that will best accomplish each operation. Likewise, each teaching technique is a tool; one method can be used to greatest advantage in one situation, another will work best in a different situation. In teaching any information or skill we automatically, if not consciously, select a particular method for instruction. An automatic choice of method exercised by a person with no formal training in teaching may be perfectly reasonable. The naturally gifted teacher has an instinctive way of knowing the best strategy to use in each situation. Nevertheless, it is best that we have some understanding of the different teaching methodologies and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Then, just as a craft person chooses the tool that is best suited for a particular task, we can knowledgeably select the method that is best suited for conveying certain information or developing a particular skill.

Teaching Strategies

There are four basic methods or strategies of teaching:

1. didactic lecturing
2. hands-on activities or experimentation
3. coaching
4. seminaring

I will address each of these further, and give particular emphasis to seminaring. This technique is grossly underused, but in my opinion it is the best technique in aiding students to build informational structures and develop the skill of critical thinking. It is also required in order to bring the experience of hands-on activities to a higher level of understanding. Additionally, it serves to develop skills of appropriate social interactions among students, and it lends itself admirably to the teaching of values. Cooperative learning, a current buzz word in education circles is, we shall see, the natural outgrowth of seminaring.

Didactic Teaching

The didactic method of teaching is what we are all most familiar with from our high school and college experiences. The teacher stands in front of the class giving out information and students take it in as well as they can. Presentations may be enhanced by writing out key points on the board, providing written handouts, showing visuals, giving demonstrations, and so on. Still, communication is basically from the teacher as presenter to the students as receivers.

Use of printed materials, including texts, may be considered as a form of didactic teaching. The text is essentially a surrogate teacher presenting the material. The didactic method is by far the most time-efficient way for the teacher to give out information, and for some things, such as directions, there is no other practical way. Also, because didactic methodology is largely independent of class size, it can accommodate large classes where other methods become unwieldy or impossible.

Unfortunately, testing reveals that most elementary students actually learn and retain a very small percentage of what is presented didactically. Therefore, many educators advocate diminishing didactic teaching so far as possible and using other methods, especially hands-on exercises, that presumably capture the student's attention more effectively. Assuming a lecture is well presented, however, recognize that the shortfall is in the students' capacity to absorb and retain the information. The didactic method does require intent listening, note taking (usually) and review, study and thought afterwards to structure and reinforce the information in the mind.

My position is that we need to focus more attention on helping students develop these attributes rather than going far out of our way to avoid didactic teaching. At the very least, a question of preparation for life is involved. Students will continue to confront didactic teaching in real life, whether high school and college lectures or their boss giving instructions. We will serve them best by helping them become effective learners in the didactic situation. Such training will be addressed under seminaring, discussed shortly, and under teaching the skills of note taking in Chapter 2, page .

Hands-on Activities and Experiments

The virtue of hands-on activities and having students conduct experiments is embodied in the cliché, "Experience is the best teacher." If we draw the student to actually experience what we are teaching through an activity, or by conducting an experiment, they will learn and retain it better. At least that is the theory. Unfortunately, this theory has some failings. While hands-on exercises may capture the students' attention, they may be almost devoid of informational content, hence a most inefficient way of conveying information.

For example, I observed one fourth-grade class in which the teacher was teaching a social studies unit on cities. All the students were busily engaged in building a model city on a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood. They were making buildings from Styrofoam blocks, pasting on squares of colored paper for doors and windows, marking out streets. In other words, this was no small undertaking; it was a two-week unit. I asked the teacher if she was having the students consider water and sewer. "No!" she said, "I don't deal with anything below ground." To be sure, students seemed to be having fun with their project, but I really wonder how much (if anything) new they were actually learning through this hands-on activity. Certainly nothing new about buildings and streets, as they see these things in real life every day. And crucial factors such as the utilities, which are the lifeblood of a city, were not even to be addressed. This is not to say that I am against hands-on activities. So far as possible, we need to bring students to directly observe and experience their subject matter.

For example, different kinds of plants and animals are best learned about through the hands-on activity of collecting, comparing, and contrasting different species (or photographs of them). Similarly, physical forces are best learned by having students set up situations where the results can actually be seen, experienced, and measured. You will find that the curriculum I present in the following chapters is full of these kinds of hands-on activities.

What I am saying is that hands-on activities need to be carefully evaluated.

• First the activity must bring students to focus on something that is really unique to their experience.
• Second, the activity needs to be followed by a debriefing session in which students are brought to consider what they have observed or experienced and what it means in terms of a broader framework of understanding.
• Without this debriefing (seminaring) session, students will readily demonstrate that they can participate in an activity or perform a directed experiment and still not have an inkling of what it was about.

Coaching

We are all familiar with sports coaching. The coach demonstrates the desired movements, and students are asked to imitate the movements as best they can. The coach then corrects their movements bit by bit until they are perfected. No amount of talking about how to swing the bat (didactic methodology) by itself will bring students to master the skill. Skills are only mastered by doing, and the student must do the doing.

Although coaching is a perfectly obvious example in the case of teaching physical skills, it is often forgotten that reading, writing, and arithmetic -- the three -- are really skills, not information. They are the skills of receiving, giving, quantifying, and otherwise working with information. The same may be said of critical thinking. Observe that the information involved can be anything. Handling information draws on the same reading, writing, numerical, and thinking skills regardless of the information itself.

We may use coaching instinctively in the teaching of reading, writing, and math skills, as we do for physical skills. However, it is beneficial if we understand (1) that we are being coaches and (2) our proper role as a coach. Coaches are not there to demonstrate or exhibit their own skill, and they are certainly not in any way there to criticize unskilled beginners or their rate of progress, even if it is slow. The good coach uses encouragement to bring learners to make a first try, gentle guidance toward improving, and praise for every step of progress regardless of their starting point.

A danger of trying too hard in one's coaching efforts is that students may conclude that the skill is simply too difficult to master and drop out from any further effort. In addition, coaching is likely to be successful only if the student really appreciates the importance of the skill as a means to reach a greater objective. Skills are meaningless in and of themselves. For example, it would be absurd to learn to swing a bat simply for the sake of swinging a bat. It only makes sense in the broader context of hitting a ball and learning to play baseball. This seems perfectly obvious; but too often exercises in learning the three R's get dissociated, in the child's mind at least, from anything meaningful or practical.

For example, we teach students to read inane stories that do not interest them or relate to their own lives, to write and spell vocabulary words apart from what they want to talk about, and to calculate numbers devoid of any units. Reading lessons should be on stories or information that really intrigue students, writing lessons should be geared to helping children write what they really want to express, and math lessons should deal with real quantities that children can relate to and understand. Later chapters will give many examples of making reading, writing, and arithmetic relevant to children's lives.

Coaching is, by its nature, never really more than one-on-one. Therefore, it is most effective when performed consciously one-on-one. A teacher coaching a whole class can really only observe and deliver specific instructions for improvement to one student at a time. Hopefully, other students may profit from the advice delivered to one of their peers. However, as class size increases, coaching becomes increasingly unwieldy and less effective. Some students are bound to get little, if any, direct attention and may simply tune out to the whole process. Although for the teaching of skills class size must be small (ideally one-on-one, but no more that 10-15), a teacher has some alternatives if the class is larger and need not revert to didactic teaching.

Some teachers will divide the class so that, while part of the class is working on one assignment, he or she can coach others. Better, schools and teachers can certainly enlist the help of volunteers from any and every source possible: parents and other caregivers, senior citizens, more skilled students. Please note, however, that the prime traits of a coach are patience and compassion, and not all volunteers or more skilled students will have these attributes. A coach without patience and compassion is likely to become frustrated and annoyed with the level and/or the slow pace of progress.

The student is more than likely to pick up on this even if it is not directly expressed, feel badly about their efforts, and drop out. Summarizing, the didactic method is fine for presenting information and coaching is necessary for the teaching of skills. Yet both didactic teaching and coaching infer a one-directional flow from the teacher to the student. It is assumed that the teacher knows the information or the skill and is simply imparting it to the student. The student is seen basically as a learner. Questioning on the part of the student is not encouraged nor even desired. Indeed, the "good" student is one who readily absorbs the lessons without question or comment.

Therefore, neither the didactic nor coaching methods serve to develop the all-important attributes of critical thinking, reasoning, or creativity. Nor do they aid the student in building what they learn or experience into the coherent informational structure that is so important in long-term retention and comprehension. In a later section, I shall describe seminaring in some detail as the strategy for imparting these all-important attributes. First, we need to examine in more detail exactly what we mean by critical thinking, structuring information, and reasoning, and how the mind exercises these traits.

Seminaring

In the adult world, seminaring is the business, professional, or committee meeting where a group of people discuss ideas to deal with problems or accomplish objectives. Usually a moderator outlines the problem or objective and may share an idea to start the ball rolling. Others may propose their own ideas as supplementary or alternative approaches. Others may critique some ideas as unworkable. After some discussion someone may have an inspiration, "Why don't we try an entirely different approach?" Finally, either the group comes to a decision or concurs that certain vital pieces of information are missing. The participants may decide to adjourn to find that information and meet again when it is available.

Another example of seminaring in adult life is book or other discussion groups. The same process applies, only the questions differ. What point is the author making through this work? What is she or he saying or showing us through this character? Seminars exist, to use the cliché, because two minds are better than one. One mind cannot possibly see all the facets of an issue, nor have all the points of view that pertain to its resolution. By freely sharing and discussing ideas and viewpoints, we all stand to gain a greater understanding of the issue, and it is more likely that rational and workable decisions can be reached.

But now look at a deeper level at what is going on in the minds of the seminar participants. They are receiving new bits of information from others. They are recalling relevant information from their own knowledge and experience. They are test-fitting the new ideas with their own experience and knowledge and offering their own thoughts accordingly. They are witnessing their thoughts being test-fitted by others and getting feedback. If the feedback shows that their initial response was off target, or contained an illogical element, they revise their thinking accordingly. In short, the seminar environment is demanding participants to structure information, to think critically, and to think logically.

To put this in terms of learning outcomes, each participant of a seminar is learning these critical thinking skills: 1. Listening with attention to what others are saying. 2. Recalling what they know or have experienced about the same or related subjects. 3. Test-fitting the ideas presented against their own knowledge and experience, i.e., critical thinking. 4. Exercising creative thinking as they manipulate the thoughts or images in their minds and come up with their own ideas or inspirations. 5. Putting thoughts into sentences and speaking (or writing) them out clearly and distinctly. 6. Working with other members of the group in reaching a common goal.

Each member goes away feeling good, that they have gained a better understanding of the total picture and that they themselves have contributed to the better understanding of others. Teachers who master the skill of seminaring are uniformly excited about how much their students' learning and understanding strides forward and how much pleasure they experience through seminars. Here we are seeing the real pleasure that is derived from learning. I can only advocate that seminaring be widely and frequently used from kindergarten on.

Are you interested in this book

Click here to buy

All sales of books from the link above
help to support this FREE website.
Thank you for your support.
- - - Sue & Joe

more homeschooling articles

Reading Rescue 1 - 2 - 3
Raise Your Child's Reading Level 2 Grades
with This Easy 3-Step Program
Interview with  Peggy M. Wilber, M.Ed.
hosted by Joe Spataro
Peggy Wilber  is the cofounder of the Pikes Peak One+One Reading Tutoring Program and teaches parents, grandparents, tutors and educators how to help children improve their reading skills. She says, "Research has shown that children who don’t read well become better readers when they receive auditory training." Find out more about her system, how it relates to dyslexia and ADD/ADHD, and get some practical tips to help your child learn to read better.
Find out more

Montessori Education: Is It For You?
by Chrystal Mueller
To me, the Montessori method is such a logical way to learn. Each piece of work prepares the child for the next work he will be doing. And each work is self-correcting so the child may discover his mistake while the teacher says nothing.

"Sing With Me A-B-C"
by Bente Martinsen and Solveig Pedersen
hosted by Joe Spataro
featuring FREE samples of her program
"Sing With Me ABC" works with basic letter recognition, phonemic awareness, and also with numbers and rhythm and rhyme. The books supplement any reading and music curriculum for pre-school and kindergarten. In this interview with author Bente Martinsen, she discusses how music is such a valuable part of the learning process, how the program was developed, her perspectives from Europe compared to the US, how the collaboration began with her co-author Solveig Pedersen; and FREE samples of how the program works with the letters A, N, P & the whole alphabet. If you have a question about the program, you are welcome to participate in our discussion group and ask a question.

What is the best way
to teach my child?

Find out with
Online Self-Portrait™
Learning Style Profiles
Now get $5 off!!
Find out more - click here