Everything I Know About Teaching I Learned from The Magic School Bus

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I am convinced that all it takes to be a better teacher is to ask yourself - WWMFD? (What Would Ms. Frizzle Do?) continually during the day.  In no particular order, here's what I've learned about teaching from watching The Magic School Bus way too many times for a normal adult female:

Hands On Learning
I'll be the first to admit that I remember almost nothing I learned from my K-12 experience (well, excluding my abilities to read and do some rudimentary math).  What does remain with me are the hands on opportunities for learning that I had - the fieldtrips, experiments, dioramas, toothpick bridges, plays, etc.  The best learning is learning that feels more like discovery and exploration than memorization and rejurgitation.  Okay, so at this point you're probably already thinking that you have way too much content to cover things in a "Ms. Frizzle" way.  There are so many standards thrown at teachers (and new ones each year) that it's often easiest just to hand out a worksheet and call it a day.  But by embedding those standards into hands on learning, it is not only possible to cover more content at once, students are actually enjoying learning.  I maintain that learning can and should be fun!

Make Learning Fun
Any topic can be made interesting with the right approach.  Learning about germs doesn't seem that interesting until you're the size of a white blood cell.  Then it's more "alien invaders" than microbiology.  Find a slant that interests kids.  We're wired as humans to want to learn.  Nobody has to teach a baby to crawl or roll over, they keep trying things out until they learn it themselves.  And nobody holds a gun to adults' heads to get them to watch The History Channel, when it's not the white-washed, watered-down textbook version of it, history is really interesting!  The world is amazing, we as teachers just need to harness it.

Teamwork
How often have you, as an adult, worked in isolation without a team?  Now granted, teachers might be a little more isolated than most professionals, reigning supreme over their own little classroom kingdoms, but the majority of adults work in pairs, teams, groups, gaggles, basically anything but solo.  In the professional world it is recognized that everyone has different strengths, and true leaders learn to exploit (in a good way) those strengths for the good of the team.  Noone's good at everything, but everyone's good at something.  Your role as a teacher and leader should be to help students determine where their strengths lie and give them the opportunity to contribute to the team.  Which leads me to...

Participatory Roles
If you're not familiar with Alan November's Students as Contributors: Digital Learning Farm article, I highly suggest you take a look. Because students shouldn't be a passive audience to their own education. They should be actively participating and making the classroom a better, more vibrant place by sharing their skills, ideas, information, etc. Harness those multiple intelligences! Not only does this lead to a sense of purpose in students, it also gets students interested and invested in what they're doing.

Students Do the Work
All Ms. Frizzle did was drive the bus.  Half the time she just dropped her students off and disappeared, leaving the kids to do all the learning through experimentation, asking themselves questions, and applying background knowledge.  Instead of planning, planning, planning lessons that appeal to you as a teacher, let students have control over their own learning experiences.  Let them do the work of researching for their own background information, deciding how they want to compile their new knowledge, and teaching their classmates what they've learned.  Don't do the work for them, otherwise, your brain is growing, not theirs.  With that in mind...

Teachers Shouldn't Answer Questions, Students Should
Sure, it's easier just to give students the answer, but what's going to stick with a student longer, that one sentence answer, or the process it took to find the answer for themselves? We do students a disservice by providing all the answers nice and easy for them. Life isn't like that. You can't just look up the answer in the back of the book and work backwards to find the answers to life's big questions. It would be nice, but no.  

Assessment Doesn't Have to be A Test (Nor Does it Have to be Boring)
Basically every time those kids stepped through those yellow doors, they were stepping into a half hour long pop quiz.  They'd already received the background knowledge in the classroom, now they had to apply it.  Think out of the box when it comes to assessment.  Why does assessment need to be individual (as long as everyone's contributing)?  In the real world, lots and lots of people are a part of a team that succeeds or fails together. 

So, what has Ms. Frizzle taught you?