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| Based on decades of success with student teachers, POLAR+
is a way to help students improve their whole-group teaching
skills by focusing attention on parts of the process
that need improvement and reinforcing other parts of
the process that are going well. Students who master
POLAR+ find that presentations of any kind are more successful, whether
or not they are teaching. And when students' presentations improve
they discover that their confidence grows, too. To see the
whole story in a nutshell and find out what the POLAR+
acronym means, see "Frameworks" below. To see how high school
English teacher Jerri Davenport guided her students through
the POLAR+ process, and to download her materials, scroll down to "Scaffolding." Assess student progress in teaching skills
using one of the two rubrics that our Professional Partners
helped us create. |
| Remember some things: |
1. |
POLAR+ is for everyone. It is used
for all K-12 students, not only for those who are headed
toward teaching careers. We are currently developing
materials and pathways for students whose interest
in professional teaching is becoming strong and whose
peer teaching effectiveness is on the high end of the
POLAR+ rubric. They will be ready soon. |
2. |
Teaching time grows with age. POLAR+ applies to
opportunities you give students to share knowledge
with the whole class in presentations and demonstrations.
The time of these presentations generally increase
with age, as follows: 15 seconds to a minute in grades
K-3; 2-10 minutes in grades 4-8; 5-20 minutes in grades
9-12. |
3. |
POLAR+ is field tested. The rubrics and materials
were shaped on our drafts by our Professional Partners.
We continue to improve them, so please let us know
your reactions and suggestions. |
4. |
Get a cash award for a POLAR+ project. If you would
like to carry out a classroom project based on POLAR+,
apply for one of our classroom project awards. Up to
five project proposals will be approved in August for
$500 awards on completion of the project. Click on "Project
Awards" in our Professional
Partners section. |
5. |
Build better learning communities. When kids teach
better, their peers learn better; and you, the professional
educator, will have more help to build a community
of learning in your classroom. |
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| Frameworks |
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POLAR+ applies to the process all teachers
use to get a lesson ready, teach it, evaluate student
learning, and reflect on how it went. And, as a professional
educator, you know that you use your reflections
to improve the next lesson on that topic, even if
there's only a five-minute passing period in between
one class and the next on the same topic. You also
know that POLAR+ multitasking goes on in your life
throughout the school year. Here are some
definitions of the acronyms in the POLAR+ idea, including how
other school processes fit in. |
| Scaffolding |
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Getting content ready for teaching
is the creative part of our work, requiring us to
dig into the subject matter's structure for ideas
on what the students should learn next. And as Joseph
Joubert famously said, "To teach is to learn
twice." Your students can have a taste of that
experience and "learn twice" with POLAR+
opportunities you create for them, using your subject
matter knowledge to structure the teaching assignments
you give. Jerri Davenport, a tenth grade English
teacher at The Principia Upper School in the St.
Louis area, shares the materials
and processes she
used to scaffold her students for teaching parts
of speech. The same process works in other subject
areas. |
| Rubrics |
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Individual students differ in how they
manage the assignment to teach other students. The
K-3 POLAR Rubric helps early elementary grades teachers
to see these individual differences and make judgments
about next steps in helping students teach better
with each POLAR+(tm) opportunity. The 4-12
POLAR Rubric builds on the K-3 rubric. Although these rubrics
can be shared with students, they are intended for
professional use as a framework for improving kids'
teaching and tracking their progress during their
elementary and secondary school years. |
| Assessment |
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Building POLAR
profiles provides a
way to apply the POLAR+ framework to help peer teachers
see where they can improve their teaching skills.
Formative assessment is emphasized here, and the
POLAR rubric for grades 4-12 is the basis for building
a teaching profile for several kinds of peer teachers.
Novice teachers are usually "on edge" when
they finish teaching and it's a good teachable moment
for professional educators. However, using the profile
to coach individual students can help them understand
what aspects of the experience went well and what
needs improvement next. Often, changing one POLAR
skill (planning or organizing especially) can usually
lift the next experience and build the peer teacher's
confidence in their control over the teaching situation. |
| The + factor |
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The "+" is for personality--creativity, synthesis, initiative, energy.
Personality provides the creative energy that brings subject matter content to
life. Although POLAR rubrics break out certain common processes in teaching, we don't
have a rubric for the + factor and will not seek to build one. Students (and
professional educators) synthesize POLAR components in ways unique to their personalities and we are learning that peer students can recall content by identifying it with the people who taught it, especially fellow students.
Using their unique personalities, peer teachers shape learning experiences for others and lead them through these experiences.
Prior attempts to link certain general personality types with student achievement have
largely been unsuccessful; teachers and learners create too complex a social
mix for us to predict how general personality types will affect learning. What
professional educators can do is to help their students to have confidence in
the productive parts of their teaching personalities and to help them find ways
to compensate for non-productive personality features. This is a delicate process
and everyone who mentors student teachers or probationary teachers deals with
it all the time. We are now learning how to do this with K-12 students, whether
or not they intend to teach professionally. Most will, however, have children,
and parents are a child's first teachers. Our society will be better if future
parents can learn to teach well. |
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