We Are All Learners and Teachers

I have a few basic beliefs that influence how I teach:

• I believe that you learn something better when you teach it to others. 
• I believe that kids learn things from each other because they see what other kids are doing and realize that they can do it, too.
•  I believe that teaching the crew and standing up in front of them to teach something improves the confidence and speaking abilities of each crew member. 
• I believe that students will write more when they know that they will have an audience. 

Because of all of these beliefs, I have several crew members stand up in front of the crew during the debrief time of our Writer's Workshop, Reader's Workshop and Math Workshop and teach the crew what they have learned during that workshop. I choose students I worked with during that time and they teach the crew what we worked on one on one. This gives a "signal boost" to everything that I teach along with the confidence boost that each student gets. One part that each crew member particularly enjoys is getting to read the story that they have written as part of their teaching time. We all love being the student teachers of the day. I have not done a great job of capturing all of the crew doing this with photos but they all have had a turn and will have many more turns in the future. Below are photos from the times that I have remembered.