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Maryfrances Troha - Short Essay CMeeting a Teaching ChallengeOne of the greatest challenges facing both me and my college prep students is the issue of time on task. My studentsı time challenge is deciding how much time they can devote to my assignments and projects in relation to all their other curricular and extra curricular activities. My time challenge is, of course, evaluating the work I have assigned them. McRah proved to me that more time spent on task, either on the part of the student or the teacher, did not necessarily result in better learning or better assessment of learning. What McRah proved to me was that both students and teachers could actually spend less time resulting in greater productivity if lessons were well planned and carefully supervised. One of the several ideas introduced in McRah which I will implement is from the 6/27 presentation of ³The Textbook as the Teacherıs Tool² presented by Dawn Abt-Perkins. I was particularly aware that assigning each student to read each chapter represented a huge time on task load for the students and required more days to accomplish than I wanted to spend. Creating reading groups for shorter sections of material and having the students present the reading made major sense to me. The group could be guided through their section from key questions I provided or accompanying the reading. They could implement reading strategies of outlining, graphing, or annotating through the assigned section. Further, in preparing a group presentation, discussion and evaluation of the material would take place within the group that might not happen if done by an individual student. Through a group presentation involving mapping or outlining, distinguishing key terms, pointing out significant portions of text and maps and providing a point of view as to the significance of sidecar material included with the reading, all students gain the content of the material in less time, yet each student is still practicing good reading strategies in order to contribute to the group presentation. Therefore, the student gains more knowledge in less time. For the teacher it is also a time saver. I will have only five or six group evaluations to do as compared to the thirty sets of responses to guided reading questions I would be logging if each individual student was assigned to read the entire selection. When a class of thirty is multiplied by three or four sections it results in ninety to one hundred and twenty papers to grade. Any teacher can see that time on task could be used with greater results on interesting units and the grading of significant pieces of student writing.
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