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Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Copying Off the Board
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A friend who teaches middle school was lamenting the demise of copying off the board as an acceptable teaching technique. She said she used to employ this low-tech strategy for social studies, and had good results. Nowadays, her administrators mention this as a “what not to do,” so she comes up with games, role-playing, group projects and other ideas more in sync with the “hands on” mantra.
But she thinks her students learned better when they copied a fact-filled paragraph off the board, followed by a discussion and later a quiz. Also, she thinks copying prepared them for note-taking, which she also taught them on occasion as part of social studies lessons.
Did you copy paragraphs off the board as a child? Is this a strategy worth returning to? Do some teachers still have their students do this? Would their be a student protest if a teacher even attempted to assign such a task?
