Structure and Freedom
Have you ever thought that structure gives way to freedom - of thought, creativity, new ideas? Let's talk more about this!
Structure gives way to freedom – this can be counterintuitive at times. The way to allow students to have freedom to think critically, read, write and be themselves is to give them structure in their everyday classroom. I don’t mean we give them a textbook, tell them to open to page x and read or do the day's lesson, hand it in and get a grade. What I mean is that we need to give students a way to structure their thinking from start to finish in the classroom to support them towards new ideas and learning opportunities. We do this by creating routines. We lead them to create their own conclusions, but we can’t give them rote exercises to complete, fill in the blank and then leave the class, never to think of the lesson again until tomorrow.
We need to encourage them to think about big ideas, ask US questions (even when we don’t know the answers) and give students confidence to use the content vocabulary and language in context. The only way for students to do this is for us to guide them, and the way we guide them is to give them routines and structures that are open-ended enough to provoke new ideas, but not so open-ended that there is chaos or that students feel unsafe in their learning environment.
What do daily lessons for culturally, linguistically and academically diverse learners include (in my opinion) to create structure and that gives way for freedom? They:
Address or move towards essential questions and central themes
Include activities differentiated based on student needs
Have a daily structure
Follow a weekly structure (as in doing things on certain days)
Allow for higher order thinking and student questions
Include activities that lead towards the final project - either in content understanding or skill practice
Include places where you can assess student learning
Include scaffolds for multilingual learners and students with disabilities
What are my top four daily routines that I use? Find out in my next post… tomorrow!