On Friday Mrs. H (my cooperating
teacher) and I had an interesting talk about what she likes to call “teachable
moments”: moments when a lesson twists away from the plan, but towards some
bigger understanding. For instance, on Friday Mrs. H led a discussion on what
it means to be happy and the students didn’t really involve themselves or ask many
questions. A few offered up anecdotes like “happiness is being happy with what
you have,” but the discussion didn’t go any deeper than that. To get them to
think more deeply about it, my coop spontaneously drew a line across the white
board and told everyone to come up and make a “happiness scale” from -2 to 2.
Once everyone had put a few things on the board, the discussion took off
because the students wanted to know why everyone else had written what they did.
The discussion never came to a conclusion, but ended when the bell rang. Mrs. H
told me that the scale was not on her lesson plan at all, but had just come to
her on the spot as a way to involve her students in the lesson and make it more
relevant to their lives. To me, that was subversive teaching at its finest.
Mrs. H saw a way to use student-student interaction to help students ask
questions and dig deeper and was willing to deviate from her original plan in
order to make it all work. She never told students her thoughts on the subject,
but pushed the class to express their questions and opinions without ever
coming to a conclusion.
When I ask myself how I can be subversive
in this school, I keep thinking back to Mrs. H’s “teachable moments”. I want to
be able to adapt lessons on the spot in a way that get students thinking, interacting
and asking questions. If I can teach like that, it will be easier for students
to make the connection between the material that they are learning and their
lives outside of school. These elements are at the heart of subversive
teaching.
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