Week+7

//First, my deepest thanks for the heartfelt feelings you sent me and for way you carried the class in my silence. As I noted on the board, our class in constructivism was conducted in a constructivist manner.// You //did observations,// you //reflected on them,// you //commented on them. Then you did original presentations and reflected on them. Almost none of the content in the class was generated or delivered by the teacher -// you constructed it //. The teacher's job (mine, in this case) was to try to structure the activities so that they could lead to meaningful learning. You are the ultimate judges of whether that learning was meaningful or not (despite the depressing reports of your observations!).//

//Next week in class we will continue, and hopefully wrap up our discussion of constructivism (even though we will refer back to it later on). For next week (Nov 24) there are no assigned readings, but there is an assigned task. As you consider your lessons for פסח, for which you have already defined goals and generated at least one meaningful activity, we need to consider that is important to impart some kind of textual skills to our students. Those can include reading skills, translation skills, grammatical skills, literary skills, and more. P lease bring with you to class both the activity you designed for the Nov 17 class (which we did not have an opportunity to review together) and some kind of activity that will teach/reinforce some textual skill. There is no need to post these on the wiki, but those who want to e-mail me prior to the class to get feedback I will be happy to do that for you.//