discovering your classroom's dna--dynamic needs assessment (nelb 2006)

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

Dynamic Needs Assessment

It’s not my job.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

Teachers are qualified to plan curriculum.

If they can implement someone else’s plan, why can’t they write there own?

So, curriculum planning should be part of pre-service and in-service training.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• Dynamic forces are those that cause action, reaction and interaction within the individual and/or between the individual and the content, the teacher, and/or the group.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• The teacher’s attitude toward the learner, material, and toward teaching itself has profound effects upon the dynamic forces, as does the teacher’s personality.

• Put in a spiritual law context, one reaps what one sows.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

Curriculum Anatomy

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

Postulates about curriculum exist in

these areas:

1) curriculum as a genre,

2) curriculum planning as a process,

3) curriculum development component (selecting materials), and

4) curriculum leadership (supporting ongoing planning and development).

Newer Bloom

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• As a statement of fundamental reasons, the rationale is an exposition and explanation of principles.

• It explains why, as LeRoy Ford states, “somebody (the learner) is learning . . . something (the scope) in . . . some way (the methodology) . . . somewhere (the context) for . . . some purpose (institutional goals).

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

Curriculum Application

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• The term curriculum derives from the verb currere, which means “to run.” LeRoy Ford in A Curriculum Design Manual for Theological Education writes that curriculum is a running or a race course. How interesting that curriculum is often delivered in a “course” of study.

• In Biblical context, the running definition is good in that we should “run and not be weary.” Thus, a well-designed curriculum should energize, invigorate, and renew its planners and users alike.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

Lundgren’s Frame Factors and the Teaching process set forth three components of a teaching paradigm: • goals and content in curriculum, • time of instruction• class composition according to ability of students

to reach goals. The object of his research was to study the effects of the frame factors on the teaching process and learning outcomes.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• A Christian view of learning:

The teacher is like a midwife. A midwife and

mother participate in birth. The midwife

facilitates. The mother gives birth. The

mother depends on the midwife to make her

task easier. The midwife depends on the

mother to make her work meaningful.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• Learners have a triune nature (spirit, soul, body) and as such are on a spiritual journey and are in search of relationships and some kind of faith orientation (some of which are destructive—like alcoholism—and require restoration). Faith is taught and caught.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• The teacher must see the learner in humanistic pattern (Curriculum: A Comprehensive Introduction, 198).

• In so doing, he/she will have “the image of the learner as a developing person . . . an individual who is not only intellectual but also developed in aesthetic and moral ways.”

• The key phrase follows: “Subject matter is valued only as it matches the learner’s psychological organization.”

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• Nancy Eisland’s and R. Stephen Warner’s chapter in Studying Congregations, points out the importance of seeing your congregation and its ministry (or classroom and learning) in context to its surroundings.

• World, national, regional, and community events impact and contribute to the shaping of a church and congregation (or school and classroom).

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• More relevant knowledge can better meet the needs of the society and can replace the sacred cow old skills that are no longer needed (The Saber-Tooth Curriculum).

Teachers

Students

Administration

Teachers

Teachers

Students

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• The cultural inputs can be tricky. To include them it is necessary to have a process (Curriculum: A Comprehensive Handbook, 121).

• McNeil turns to Lawton who “recommends analyzing the kind of society that exists and then mapping out the knowledge and kinds of experiences that are most appropriate for this culture.”

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• Pazmino explains (Basics of Teaching for Christians, 54) that “no easy formulas exist for how best to teach, but basic definitions and guidelines are shared that require” adjustment “to the various settings in which the gift of teaching is exercised.”

• There are variables and an array of choices that teachers must orchestrate to produce the desired result—delivering instruction per the developed curriculum plan.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

Curriculum Accession

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• Learning is not listening, reciting, or memorizing alone.

• Learning meets a student where he/she is and in what he/she is interested.

• Learning is also based on identifying a need and is best conveyed through an activity (synthesis of the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains).

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

Brody’s article “Didactics, Heuristics, and Philetics”

(Educational Theory) distinguished three

components of teaching:• Didactics—imparting and reinforcing of skill and

knowledge • Heuristics—efforts to promote discovery by

students• Philetics—associated with love or teacher’s

concern with the well-being of students.

Discovering Your Classroom’s DNA

• I teach one thing and I teach it all semester long. Howard Gardner

Focus

Mark Eutsler

eutsler@tctc.com