TOW #9

The Washington Post posted a blog post written by former teacher and current High School Learning Coach, Alexis Wiggins. After 14 years of teaching, Wiggins decided to spend two days shadowing students. Her discoveries shocked her, so she decided to share them with the world. Wiggins writes her blog in sections labeled as 'key takeaways' involving her experience and how she would change her own class if she could to effectively show how teachers don't fully understand what it's like to be a student, and how schooling should be changed. Alexis wrote her article by splitting it up into three key takeaways. She began each takeaway with a summary of what her experience was, and then followed up with the things she would change if she was still a teacher. For example, after explaining how she found herself exhausted at the end of the day from sitting down and listening all day, she wrote about what she would change. One of them being, "build in a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day. Yes, we would sacrifice some content to do this – that’s fine. I was so tired by the end of the day, I wasn’t absorbing most of the content, so I am not sure my previous method of making kids sit through hour-long, sit-down discussions of the texts was all that effective." This not only told the audience that school should be changed, but gave a key example of how it could be changed. Throughout her essay, she expressed that throughout her 14 years of teaching, she never realized what her students were experiencing. After reading the article, I found that I agreed with a lot of what she said. All of her take-aways began with a statement about students, and I found that most of them were applicable to my daily life as a student. For example, "Students sit all day and sitting is exhausting." In the majority of my classes, I am sitting the entire time, and by the time 1:00 rolls around I have trouble concentrating or keeping my eyes open. I think that Alexis Wiggins took on a very interesting endeavor, and I am interested to know if other teachers would find the same results if they were to take on the same project.