Attention Students: Does it Matter What I Call It? (EDU 6526)

When I began my teaching career I was literally thrown into the fire. With a teacher stepping away in October of the school year, they needed a history teacher and they found me. Only……I wasn’t a history teacher nor really a teacher yet. I worked at the school, understood teenagers and taught one senior Economics course. It proved to be enough at the time and through hard work I became a respected, full time teacher at Seattle Prep. Yet despite my confidence and ability as a teacher, I simply didn’t come strapped with all the knowledge a certified teacher did. So it comes with this limitation that I really enjoyed this week’s work with advanced organizers in Survey of Instructional Stratgies.

In many ways I used advanced organizers at different times in my classes. I never called them that, thought of them as that or really fully understood what I was doing. Yet I found ways to take the seemingly unrelated to students and connect it to new material. I bridged the gap between the lives they live and the history I want them to know. This is what advanced organizers can do. My only critique of them comes from the semi-hypocrisy of David Ausubel and the authors of the Models of Teaching text. The text states: “Ausubel’s definition of advance organizers does not include strict operational guidelines for constructing them” (Dell’Olio, 394). At the same time Ausubel seems to give a lot of criteria, as does the PowerPoint lecture, of what advanced organizers ARE NOT.  While I understand we want to classify what these exactly are, it seems somewhat trivial to even worry about what they are or are not. The goal of an educator – in my opinion – is to challenge students to think critically and to be engaged in the material. I want to make these students better people for themselves and for the world around them when they leave my class. If I do that through a personal story, advanced organizer or joke, it doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t want to spend time worrying about the labels and whether I actually am using an advanced organizer. I want my students to love learning and advanced organizers can help me. Yet I won’t spend time worrying whether I matched the criteria correctly. I will only worry if I got those kids engaged in the lesson.