Lamination September 6, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Opinion.trackback
The start of the school year brings with it many preparations. Setting up a room is important to set the stage for the learning environment. Schools in my district are very particular about presentation and spend much time and effort talking about and reviewing what goes into the look of a classroom. As I look at the walls, I’m noticing a trend. Maybe it is a good one, maybe not. More of the material, like word walls, seems to be used more than once. The work is ongoing and applicable to the learning each day.
It wasn’t that long ago that knowledge was permanent. Once up on the walls, information was not expected to change. Up go the letters of the alphabet, and up they stay, all year long, whether we still need them or not. Better yet, laminate those letters so they can be reused every year because the information they represent is static, it doesn’t and shouldn’t change. Of course, that is not always the case. With the overwhelming amount of information available to us and our students, sometimes what we need to focus on isn’t just the information, but what we do with it. Can we trust what we read? Can we verify it? Can we apply it to something new?
In a world where the immediate often pushes out the important, and in schools where the inertia of previous learning methods almost always wins, maybe we should be taking more time to step back and ask ourselves what is it that we are doing that is worth laminating? How much of what goes on in a classroom is worthy of making permanent and bringing back year after year? How much of what we do should go up on the walls while we need it, and then is taken down to be replaced by something more immediate? I don’t have any final answers, but the questions seem worth asking.
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