Teachers: Go fly a kite
Recently I was at a park with my family and I overheard two different families teaching their children how to fly a kite. They did not know each other and were standing far enough away from each other so that they did not interfere with their attempts to fly a kite. What I saw and overheard intrigued me as a teacher due to the parallels with their teaching approaches and what we do in our classes around assessment and feedback. As tends to be the case, some of the approaches we effective and others were not, leading to frustration for both the adults and the children. While I was initially drawn to these kites to show my toddler son what they look like, the teacher in me quickly noticed different teaching styles that were influencing the levels of enjoyment, skill, and success for the children. While both families used…