I just posted the following to
Lookjed, the Educational Bulletin Board. Enjoy!
Dear Shalom and List:
I have read with a great deal of interest the conversation about boredom in the classroom. Research and my own personal experience in education confirms that boredom is a major contributing factor in poor academic achievement and student truancy.
I think back to the famous teaching scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off of Ben Stein teaching about "voodoo economics" to a class of high school students. You can watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmxpftPFXZg. What makes this scene so precious is the looks on the various students' faces as they each find different, creative ways to tune out the teacher and the class.
The point to realize though as others have made in this conversation is that the opposite of boring is not fun or entertaining. Rather, it is exciting, engaging, and interesting. If our goal is merely to entertain our students, they will not learn any more, and for that matter we could do a much better job entertaining our students by showing movies all day or letting them stay home from school entirely, What we want to do is excite our students by engaging them in the educational process.
I gave a Webinar earlier this year for Yeshiva University’s Institute for School-University Partnership on the rationale for using educational technology in which I dealt with this topic of boredom in the classroom. You can watch a recording of my presentation and read its supporting materials here:
http://techrav.blogspot.com/2009/09/rationale-for-using-educational.html.
Here is a summary of my observations. I like to talk about the 3 Cs in education to address the issue of boredom.
The first is Communication and Collaboration. We need to give our students opportunities to communicate with the teacher and their fellow students and collaborate with each other. As the Rav mentioned in many of his seminal talks and essays, Jewish education is primarily a dialogue. This dialogue is with teacher and student, between students, and with all of the previous generations of our Sages throughout the generations. We should seek to encourage this dialogue both in our class through active discussions and the use of the Shakla Vetarya method of questions and answers that is so common in the Talmud and rabbinic sources. Nechama Leibowitz was a master at promoting this dialogue through her use of open ended questions, her encouragement of debate, and her posing questions in which every student were required to write an answer. I like to use technology to enhance this by hosting asynchronous discussion forums in which every student has the chance to reflect and then compose responses on blogs or wikis and through the use of micro-blogging tools like Twitter to encourage 100% student participation in real-time during class.
The second approach to attacking boredom is through Constructivist and Cooperative learning. This is the natural outgrowth of the first approach. Students need to be given activities in class in which they working with each other to construct their own meaning of the text. This can be done through chavruta learning with the teacher scaffolding the material so it is on a level to challenge the students without being overly daunting. Some tools that can be used to help with this are open-ended software programs like Gemara Berura that assist students in learning through a sugya with a chavruta and project based activities like Webquests where students use online resources to create a finished product.
Finally, I also seek to create Compelling Course Content to address boredom. These are the bells and whistles that one can use to make learning “fun”. As I described before, this cannot be a primary focus, not all learning is fun. But it can be used to great effect as a part of a well constructed lesson. I like to use technology to support this through showing audio and video clips (never more than a few minutes in length), through art, and through interactive resources that are especially effective when used with a Smart Board. It is important to consider even when creating exciting and entertaining course content that it be open-ended in order to encourage questioning and higher order thinking. I find that activities where the answer magically appears after a few moments have little educational value because they only encourage rote memorization while stifling thinking.
Hopefully, my comments have helped to continue this engaging and very important conversation so that we can continue to discover ways to excite and engage our students in class.
