The Idea
Although modeling exercises can take many forms that require significant guidance from a teacher, I believe it would be possible to design a minimal version that students could practice entirely on their own. (Probably an even looser variation of the “loose modeling” exercise described in the book chapter you can download from the “The Exercise” page.) If this could be done, and if the resulting exercise still retained enough of its original efficacy, the stage would be set for something wonderful:
Suppose you were a school and you learned about a new kind of exercise that could increase your students’ reading and writing levels. Well, there are lot of these already. (Modeling is already one of them.) Teachers are always learning new techniques and methods and mixing them in with everything they’re already doing. The problem is that there is only so much time, energy, and money to be spent. There are only so many hours of classroom time.
Now suppose that this new exercise didn’t require any expenditures or special teacher training or preparation time. Suppose it didn’t even require any teachers!* Suppose that any school could simply download good texts and instructions from a website, find a parent volunteer to sit with a classroom of kids one or two days a week after school, then let the kids work on their own on the exercises and optionally read their work aloud to one another afterward. Suddenly, any school could take advantage of it, no matter how cash-strapped it was, no matter how overworked its teachers.
This is my idea. I don’t know if it will work, but the potential reward, especially compared to the cost, is too big to ignore. I think the key question at this point is: will a stripped-down form of the exercise with no teacher guidance still be beneficial?
I hope to get the first tentative answers to this question before the new school year is done.
Next: The Help I Need
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* This is not a “dis” of teachers! Any exercise would obviously be more effective with a trained teacher on the scene to help guide the students through it, but the crux of this idea is to find a way to lower the barrier to entry sufficiently that the method can see widespread adoption in the schools. (For it to “go viral,” in Internet-speak. Or for those familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: for it to “tip”.) However, if this effort also led to increased use of modeling in the classroom, that would be icing on the cake! The website that is eventually created to explain the idea and distribute the texts could also serve as a discussion forum for teachers using it in their classrooms, and that in turn could generate new ideas for improving the barebones version of the exercise.
