Implementing Ted McCain's Ideas

I must confess that my first response was to feel the same level of impatience with Ted McCain that I do with so many other “I've-seen-the-light-and-this-is-the-NEW-way-to-teach” tomes.

That accounted for the first two “significant changes” as in “Yeah, yeah, what else ya got?”

I wasn't sure if I was angry for paying so much for such a slim volume or grateful that it was, indeed, short. I started reading McCain a week late as the book was delayed due to a mix-up on payment. So I decided to read it all, all at once. (See above paragraph.)

It wasn't until he explained what he meant under:
3. We must stop giving students the final product of our thinking.
4. We must make a fundamental shift - problems first, teaching second that I changed my mind.

Finally. Here were practical, pragmatic methods of teaching that addressed the needs of 21st Century Skills. The teacher became the initiator, the source or the guide, instead of the judge and arbiter. The students were empowered to act – or not.

This completely dovetails with my experience in training adults. Adults don't want to get lectured at; they're accustomed to taking responsibility for their own learning (or not). They're used to having parameters set out and have learned (or can be coached into asking the kinds of questions that move them toward achieving the goal (finishing the job, doing the assignment).

But it was his descriptions that really turned my perceptions around – in very specific terms, he showed how a class could essentially run itself.

This was not to excuse the teacher. It seems to me that McCain's approach actually demands MORE of a teacher – certainly in finding and defining the kinds of problems/ real world situations that encompass a class's objectives and still be contained within a class.

To be a guide, to consistently resist the temptation to “tell” and to give the canned explanation, to prepare and have the resources to answer questions that may go far afield (legitimately) but beyond one's preparation also sounds far more difficult than “teaching to the test.”

As I am not currently teaching, no, I haven't implemented any of these approaches but I certainly intend to do so.