{"id":9,"date":"2013-11-17T17:15:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-17T17:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/?p=9"},"modified":"2014-05-06T13:00:10","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T13:00:10","slug":"less-of-more-or-more-of-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/less-of-more-or-more-of-less\/","title":{"rendered":"Less of More or More of Less?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s that point in the year when I’m struggling. I’m currently teaching 3 different courses (two of which I’ve never taught before), heading up the drama club, and helping to coach our senior boys basketball team. While it may seem like I’ve bit off more than I can chew, it’s exactly the giant mouthful that is sometimes required when working in a small school. More often than not, I love being as big a part as possible in the school community, but every so often you feel stretched thin and wonder how much better you might be at one passion if you were given the time needed to really pursue it. I could go on and on about how this affects my practice and planning, etc. (and I’m sure I will in another post very soon), but right now I’m just wondering what’s in the best interest of students.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I should begin by saying that I am all for a well-rounded education that goes beyond simply academics and highlights the interdisciplinary aspects of life. I love helping students take risks to uncover talents or sides of their personalities that had yet to be explored. But I do wonder when I’m planning a course or a unit, or hearing about the courses that students want to take versus those they HAVE to take, or I see a student wishing they could focus more on their passion (be it sport or art or otherwise) rather than being pulled into some level of mandatory co-curricular program that only allows them a brief taste of lots of flavours, if we’re striking the right balance for our students. Is there a right balance, or is balance always the right answer?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I’m sure the answers to these questions are as varied as our students themselves. Some may honestly not know what they want and, for these students, generalization is essential to helping them understand their options and keep as many doors open. Others may have clearly identified a passion and desire specialization.\u00a0There is a growing number of students taking one or more courses online in order to help them create their own schedule that allows them the time to focus on their passion. \u00a0<\/span>I can’t help but feel that schools can better support this process \u2013 helping students not only identify what kinds of things they are passionate about, but also helping create more opportunities to foster expertise once those passions are found. This goes beyond the most exaggerated case of sports v. arts v. academics that I’m using to illustrate my point, but also comes down to course selection\/offerings, what level of deep exploration do you allow students to do with a given text, and and any number of choices that teachers make all the time in their classroom.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With so many questions on so many aspects of this idea maybe I’ll just shoot it out to the world in two. What opportunities can we create for specialization in our classrooms? What is lost and what is gained in a specialist\/generalist approach?<\/p>\n

\"Specialist-vs-Generalist\"\"Specialist-vs-Generalist2\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s that point in the year when I’m struggling. I’m currently teaching 3 different courses (two of which I’ve never taught before), heading up the drama club, and helping to coach our senior boys basketball team. While it may seem like I’ve bit off more than I can chew, it’s exactly the giant mouthful that … Continue reading Less of More or More of Less?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":12,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cohort21"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/aaronvigar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}