Gather

Many posts ago, I spoke about gathering information. Our students do it in a variety of ways. Your teaching methods are the primary source. Students gather info from your demonstrations, displays, and discussions. How much do they retain?

Depends on their level of engagement, right? We can share stories about the student who disengages. How about the one who engages?

What does that student look like? Do they engage in some activities but disengage in others? Understanding these individual patterns of engagement is key to tailoring our teaching methods and ensuring every student's needs are met.

We need our students to gather information. We need our students to organise it. We need our students to communicate it.

We are responsible for gathering and organising skills. We set the conditions for students to gather and provide ways and means to organise what they’ve gathered.

The communication part is on them.

If their communication needs to improve, we must provide better gathering and organising tools.

Those tools are not acquired by chance. They need direct instruction. There are many ways to explicitly teach information gathering. Similarly, organising information is a discrete skill that can be taught.

All three aspects, gathering, organising and communicating, involve critical thinking and creativity.