Episode 144: Best Practice: Teach Items In Clusters (Wed., April 3, 2024)
If we want to save the schools, we have to teach more information, more quickly.
We have to find techniques that will make it easy for students to remember stuff.
One of the easiest and most essential methods is using clusters, that is several things united by their similarities.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Podcasts are presented as voice and print (i.e., TRANSCRIPT)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are two ways to help…
Visit Education Reform
for a 2-page explanation
of what we can do.
When you need a smart gift,
give Saving K-12 .
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer.
(For a list of literary titles, visit Lit4u.com.
Still under construction but worth a look.)
------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------
LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
Support the Show.
LET'S FIX EDUCATION by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 144 -- Wed., April 3, 2024
Best Practice: Teach Items In Clusters
I suspect that “best practice” and “evidence-based” are the two most overused phrases in education. In fact, it's my brutal conclusion that our Education Establishment hardly knows how to teach at all. They seem to pick the least efficient methods, and then lie about them.
However, I wanted to introduce this column with their lingo. I’m sure that teaching in clusters is an example of best practice. Do it as much as possible because everything will get a little easier.
For no particular reason, a few days ago, I found myself thinking about the word century.
I wondered if kids today even know what a century is. They are not taught dates and historical periods. They have little sense of time and chronology. If you ask them when World War II was or when Jesus was said to be on Earth, they might say 100 years ago, 1000 years, 10,000 years, or any random number.
So how can we remedy all these ailments quickly, simultaneously? Teach events, dates, or objects in clusters. Indeed, teach all words in clusters. So the audience learns a lot at one time, and each item is a mnemonic link to all the other items. You try to create a matrix. Why teach one city (or one anything) at a time? Teach the two or three biggest cities in a certain area. Explain their common traits, and that's the cluster, that’s the mnemonic.
Let's consider how the word century can teach a lot of history.
Draw four vertical lines on the blackboard. Label them 1700, 1800, 1900, and 2000. Start telling things that happened near 1800, such as our Revolution and the War of 1812. Then jump over the Civil War, tapping its place on the blackboard. You reach a really busy cluster near 1900—electricity, gasoline engine, cars, airplanes, all arrived very quickly, in a decade or two. First airplane flight, 1903. First commercial airline flight. 1914.
The vertical lines give you a matrix and you start plugging in information the students might find interesting.
The word cent is a short version of century, which means 100. The Roman military had a unit of 100 soldiers led by a centurion.
And you have dollars and cents, and a cent is a penny, one hundredth of a dollar. You see this word also in Spanish countries where they pay centavos.
Then you have percentage, which means per hundred.
Centennial is the hundredth anniversary. A c-note is 100 dollars and is, by the way, default universal currency on planet Earth.
Now you can talk about centigrade, which is temperatures, and centimeters which is measurements, and centipede, which is insects.
In many cases, if somebody doesn't tell students something, they don't know it, possibly forever. Right now most students are in a knowledge drought, a wisdom drought, so teach as much as possible. At the same time, try to make it so students can’t miss what you're saying. Clusters will be beneficial.
Here's another approach to a cluster. You have a picture of a courtroom and you have the 10 most important objects with labels on them: judge, bench, defendant, stenographer, security, plaintiff, attorney for the defense, attorney for the plaintiff, spectators.
Think of all the loaded words – airport, factory, car, human body, ear – we could teach 5 or 10 things in a few minutes. Don't try to wrap it all up at one time. Teach other clusters, and then come back to the first one. The same picture but possibly with a few extra items.
Much learning can be reduced to interesting puzzles. You show a photograph with 5 things labeled and you ask the kids if there is something else in this photograph they would like to know the name of.
The problem in K-12 is that students are being dumbed down by teachers who have themselves been dumbed down by Marxist rhetoric. Is the world really a better place if everyone is equally ignorant? No, just ignorant. If you want better schools, simply tell the truth, facts are fun and knowledge is power.
Thank you.
----------------------------
Please share this with people,
especially teachers and parents.