Thinking about your students through a developmental lens will enhance your teaching each and every day. It will also make your job more interesting and therefore more fun. You can do this in a general way by getting into a three-step habit:
…
Whenever possible, as you come up with new activities or plan some curriculum, build on children’s natural inclinations; don’t work against them. For example, rather than find a way to insist or cajole children into sitting still, come up with learning activities that employ their huge need to be active, both physically and mentally.
Children are as quirky as adults. Don’t try to make them all the same. A child who needs time alone, or has one very intense interest, should be helped to use his or her idiosyncrasy, not required over and over again to bypass or suppress it. We don’t want all children to be the same. We want them to be more of who they each are.
Helping children learn or practice specific academic skills can be helpful, and sometimes it’s required for one reason or another. But it’s not the same as helping children develop. Make sure that there are many opportunities for your children to develop new ways of thinking and being in the world. Your classroom is an environment rich with human interaction, which should foster a child’s intellectual and personal growth. Focus on how to make it a good environment for a child’s development. Allow yourself to do a little less and notice a little more.
Watch and listen to your students, and use what you see and hear to think about who they each are and how they are developing. Let those insights guide you as you come up with simple and low-key ways to help them grow.
…
Learn more about The Children You Teach at Heinemann.com
She is the author of seven previous books: The Stories Children Tell: Making Sense of the Narratives of Childhood, Context is Everything: The Nature of Memory, Real Kids: Making Sense in Everyday Life, Red Flags or Red Herrings: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood, The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools, and most recently, A School of Our Own: The Story of the First Student-Run High School, and a New Vision for American Education which she co-wrote with her son Sam. Her writing on education has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Salon, The Huffington Post, and The Boston Globe.
Susan is one of the founders of an experimental school in New York State, where she served as educational advisor for eighteen years. She lives in New Marlborough, Massachusetts with her husband Tom Levin. They have three sons, Jake, Will, and Sam.