PIDP 3260 The Skillful Teacher Ch. 17 Review

For this blog post (Week 5's assignment), we are required to comment on Stephen D Brookfield's The Skillful Teacher Ch. 16 - Understanding Students' Resistance to Learning or 17 - Responding to Students' Resistance to Learning. I'm going to focus on Ch. 17, because I believe I already understand resistance and I think what is in Ch. 17 is more applicable to me right now.

The author gives these main points in this chapter:

• Try to sort out the causes of resistance
• Ask yourself if the resistance is justified
• Research your students' backgrounds
• Involving former resisters
• Modeling
• When appropriate, involve students in planning
• Use a variety of teaching methods and approaches
• Assess learning incrementally
• Check that your intentions are clearly understood
• Build a case for learning
• Create situations in which students succeed
• Don't push too fast
• Admit the normality of resistance
• Try to limit the negative effects of resistance

I think for me, the main takeaways for me in this chapter were to research my students and of course, try to limit the negative effects of resistance.

Researching my students seems a little creepy. However, I do think that researching neurodivergencies and different cultures will only help my instruction overall. Reseaching my individual students, like creeping them on social media and such is definitely creepy. I don't want to know them THAT well.

I think, for the most part, I try really hard naturally to overcome resistance in the classroom because I'm like a human version of a golden retriever, but sometimes I just have resistance. I think my activities and things I'm teaching are cool, but not everyone thinks so. It was never more apparent when my kids turned into teenagers, and then what was fun is no longer "cool". I am now "cringe"...but yet, I know they will come around into having fun again. I do miss having my own cheer squad though. Managing the negative effects on myself and those who actually are interested in participating is definitely something I struggle with. I could use more information on that

References

Brookfield, S (2015) The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust and Responsiveness in the Classroom. Jossey-Bass.