One question proposed for this week’s discussion is:

Under normal circumstances I’d just throw the topic out there and let you deal with it, but there’s one specific notion that I want you to consider along with all the others. I’ve had this discussion in several classes now — including those where I was a student — and it always amazes me. The question is:

Is it the teacher’s role to create knowledge or to organize knowledge?

The answer to this question depends on who you are asking. A student’s perspective can be different from a teacher’s perspective. A new teacher’s perspective can be different from a veteran teacher’s perspective. An administrator’s perspective can be different from a teacher’s perspective.

From a student’s perspective, we believe that it is the teacher’s job to create knowledge and to teach us what we need to know.  Many students feel like teachers know everything about their subject, and if we ask them a question, they should just be able to tell us the answer.  This is how my students see me, more like a resource.  It drives them nuts when I answer a question with a question to try and get them to think for themselves.

New teachers (myself included, only year 4) carry some of the belief that students have.  My first three years of teaching, I believed that I created and organized the knowledge for my students, and if I just told it to them, that they would learn it and retain it, much like I did when I was in school.  This is not the case.  I could not believe when they failed tests and didn’t even try to get homework done.  So I worked on my teaching, gave them more notes, offered to do homework in class to help them out, but it didn’t really make a difference with most of them–no motivation, no reason to want to learn.

Veteran teachers who have worked at learning something new about teaching each year through professional development, discussions with colleagues, and experience, see that the knowledge is already out there, no need to create it, they just need to organize it into ways that students can understand and motivate students to learn.  These teachers have a pretty big toolbox of materials and ideas.

Administrators put their trust that teachers will be able to create and organize the knowledge that students need in order to do well on standardized testing.  It is up to the teachers to find the ways to insure student success.

So which is right–are we creators of knowledge or organizers of knowledge?  I believe that we are both, depending on the capacity in which we, as teachers, are working.  Are we planning our instruction (creating) or are we presenting our materials well so students learn something (organizing)?