Bob Fecho- Key points

After reading Bob Fecho's book, Teaching for the Students Habits if Heart, Mind, and Practice in the Engaged Classroom, several key points resonated with me. I will highlight the three key points I thought were most relevant to my classroom needs, and would help be better my practice.

Chapter 1
Fecho states " If we want to imagine and educational system that prepares current learners to exist in a future world that is evolving at the speed of imagination, we need one that is generative, that sees learning as meaning making and not as meaning inheriting."

We focused a lot on student centered activities during the first half of our term. This key point sums up our term quiet well. In order for our students to compete in a world rapidly evolving, they must be an active participant in their education and learn to generate their own meaning needed to make sense of concepts taught in school. In order to accomplish this, teachers must move past lectures and feeding students information. Students must find ways to process information and generate ideas about the topic once given information. If teachers are always developing meaning for students, and telling them how to go about processing information, students will become dependent upon teachers to make sense of all information given to them. We expect students to think critically during assessments, when they are not given much opportunity to think critically through out the lesson. I thought by just providing students with engaging activities, and giving them options throughout the lesson I was being student centered and helping them think critically. In actuality it involves more than this. Fecho provided and example that I will try and adapt with each unit in order to help my kids become critical thinkers and discover meaning for themselves.
 Instead of teaching students about the characteristics of a Haiku, the teacher gives the students several examples of Haiku's and asks the students to discover what they have in common. Once students discover they all share the same structure 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables, and all discuss nature in some form then they must create their own Haiku. This involves the students in their learning and forces them to come up with characteristics of a Haiku, then allows them to use what they learned to write one. This can be adapted to many literature concepts. If students are involved in discovering something new they are more likely to retain the information.

Chapter 2
Chapter two promotes dialogue as the center of instruction. Fecho uses ideologies found in Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed to support his stance.

Fecho includes, "For Freire dialogue existed at the intersection of love, humility, and faith and its only there that a horizontal relationship of mutual trust can exist, only there that playing table can be leveled." Then he goes on to point out, " The political realities of classrooms limit the amount of transformation teachers can engineer within the limits of four by four blacks, scripted lessons, decontextualized high stakes testing and the like.

This point resonated with me because as educators, I believe most of us enter the teaching profession beaming with love, humility, and faith that leads to trust. We are ready to light fires in our students, and we envision a dialogue rich environment, where learning everyone is engaged in the learning process. Then reality sets in and we become burdened by the "political realities of classrooms" and we allow those  realities to limit our capabilities. This is evident every single day we enter our classroom, and it is even more evident when we are learning new practices and rule them out due to the political realities getting in our way. Too many times we shut out great ideas because they will not work in our classroom due to "things out of our control". We must fine a way to bring back the love, humility, and faith. We must share it with our students and create a classroom full of the three. Only then will we be able to create mutual trust, and from there we can spark dialogue that will truly engage our students in their learning.

Chapter 3
Fecho discusses a transnational stance for classrooms.
According to Roseblatt (1995), a transnational stance for a classroom means, "supply students with the knowledge, the mental habits, and the impetus that will enable (them) to solve (their) problems." Additionally, "Schools and colleges should not be places where "ready-made formulas and fixed attitudes are taught but should instead provide a suitable context within which learner develop the will to learn."

This last point sums is how I want to lead my classroom. I want my students to have the tools to solve the problems they are presented with. I want them to be independent critical thinkers. I do not want to just provide them with my theories and logic, I want them to develop their own, and consequently develop a love for learning.