Teaching is Knowing How Students Learn

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Teaching is Knowing How Students Learn
Swen Nater
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When Coach Wooden was a teen, he and his brothers worked on their father’s farm, doing chores such as plowing the field with a stubborn mule. On one occasion, Coach was working the field when the mule suddenly stopped in its tracks and refused to go any farther. Coach tried everything to get that animal to move but nothing worked. He tried pushing it, pulling it, and yelling at it but he was wasting his energy.

His father noticed and walked out to where they were. While Coach was catching his breath, Joshua Wooden walked to the front of his mule, looked it in the eye, began softly talking to it, and stroked its coarse hair on both jaws with both hands. He gently caressed its ears and then moved one hand under the jaw while the other moved up and down from between the eyes to just above the nose. Last, he walked back to the plow, took hold of the handles, and gently threw a wave into the long reigns. The mule moved forward and, after a few steps, he had Coach take over.

You can Google “How to plow a field” all you want but until you learn about mules, you’ll not get very far. Likewise, you can read all the books, listen to all the speeches, and attend all the classes you want, but until you learn about the student, you’ll have a difficult time teaching.
Although Phonics is a good way to teach some children proper decoding technique, some of its methods do not match up with how children think and reason. For example, when attempting to teach a child how to decode the middle two letters in the word, “bead,” Phonics give a clue,

“When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.”

The originators of Phonics didn’t study children enough. If they had, they would have come up with a much better approach, the method used by Read America in the program, Phono-Graphix®. 
Phono-Graphix® presents the English written code in a way children can understand, with no exceptions or rule breakers. In this program, for example, through a step-by-step method, children learn the various sounds the grapheme, “ea” (like in bead), can represent (the sound /ee/ like in read, and /e/ like in dead). That works 100% of the time. Isn’t that simple? Now when they read a new word like “bread,” they can try both sounds and choose the one that makes sense in the sentence.
That’s only a fraction of Phono-Graphix®, but all of it makes complete sense to children, even beginning readers. For more information on this program, visit http://www.readamerica.net.

Conclusion
Joshua Wooden taught his son how to understand the mule so he could get it to respond. It’s June and thousands of young people are graduating with degrees in education. Now it’s time for them to begin understanding students so they can get them to respond.  

It’s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
John Wooden