Recently I was asked to design a presentation on Testing Strategies for middle school students. It was explained to me that it needed to cover just the basics, but to give some strategies to help with multiple choice, true or false and test anxiety. The power point presentation ended up being about 12 slides and ended with a brief assignment for them to complete. Upon completing the assignment and reviewing it with the resource coordinator for this middle school, I was told to "dumb down" the presentation. She felt that the presentation was too advanced and that more animations needed to be included to keep the kids attention. I stressed to her that while i don't want to make this presentation intimidating, I certainly didn't want to make it childish and easy to disregard. She advised me that "these types of kids" won't respond to the directive that I was giving about being effective in test taking strategies, and unless I wanted to be completely ignored, should really consider adding characters of some sort.
Is this how we should address our children's learning capacity? That unless we mimic a cartoon or animation, students are unable to comprehend material? I know we need to design lesson plans that are engaging, but is it really necessary to "dumb down" the material to keep their interest?
I find it a bit disturbing to know that the resource coordinator asked you to “dumb down” your presentation. If someone like that doesn’t have high expectations of the students, who will? Being that these are middle school students, I believe you did the right thing by not making the presentation childish. Students realize when presentation, assignments, and lessons are “dumb down” for them and they just get use to that level of learning. That resource coordinator may be hurting her students by making things to easy for them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for you post!
-Jasmin