Approaches to Learning Skills
Are the Approaches to Learning Skills hard for your teachers to understand? It has been a challenge for teachers at my school for sure. Once we get the general idea of what they are understood, it becomes especially difficult to understand the explicit teaching aspect and the reasons for identifying them to students. Many teachers felt that they were teaching skills all the time, in every activity. It took a lot of time to understand the difference between using a skill and teaching a skill. Yes, we are always thinking, but are we taking time out from our activity to teach students a specific thinking skill? Are we pausing to teach them the skill out of our specific context? Usually the answer is no, and that is not teaching an ATL skill. Think of ATL skills as the tools that we want students to have in their tool box that they leave our school with and are prepared to utilize in the real world. We want to take time from our content and teach them how to use those skills. In the r...
