Source:  http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse/commentpost.aspx?news=no&postid=48341

In this week’s readings and postings, we were to pick a story from the gator, look at teachers and their roles, and write about it.   I chose this article for the heart of its message–Caveman learned by example, and we are still like cavemen.  At first, you are thinking about the years of evolution, our civilized societies, modern advances in housing, transportation, and technology, and feeling a little insulted at being compared to a caveman.  Then, the author makes this point:  “Why does it matter that cave men did not have classrooms? The existence of classrooms is based on the assumption, an assumption that is never discussed but always assumed, that people can learn by sitting quietly and listening. We imagine that people learn by being told the truth by experts and practicing to take tests to see if their minds can retain that truth.”

The role of a “teacher” in the caveman era was to show someone how to hunt, how to survive, and history was passed down orally, sitting around a campfire.  The role of the modern teacher has been to tell students what they need to know while they sit quietly, give them lots of busy work to show that they know the material, and grade them on how well they can remember.  The author of this article, Roger Schank,  calls this the “mass compulsory education.”

Now, educational learning theory is favoring the hands-on approach, cooperative learning, learning by doing, getting our students more actively involved in their learning.  Schank sums it up pretty well with these sentences:   “If experience is separated from knowledge, if what we teach is not about doing at all, then we teaching to the conscious. Conscious people may make good intellectuals, but those intellectuals are unlikely to become practitioners.  Call me crazy but I think we have plenty of intellectuals and the ability to train more. Teaching people to work together, reason about new situations, achieve their goals, just as cave men did, is what education should be about.”

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)?

After reading the Phaedrus posting below:

For those who are still confused about ZPD, maybe this article from last year will help clear it up.

\ZPD
Zone of Proximal Development is one of those buzz phrases you hear bandied about a lot in ed psych. It’s often mis-understood and probably needs some clarification.

My response was:

Your graphic of the ZPD gives a much better definition of student learning and understanding than what I had learned in a previous class. As teachers, we need to step away from the force feeding lectures and give the students the opportunity to explore learning. Teachers are a gateway to learning, facilitators, and the motivators.

When I was researching more on Vygotsky and distant teacher, I found this link which describes the concept of ZPD and strategies that teachers can use to be effective at expanding a student’s ZPD. It is:

http://www.balancedreading.com/vygotsky.html

The most significant comment to me was “The teacher must engage students’ interest, simplify tasks so they are manageable, and motivate students to pursue the instructional goal,” because this how I see my role as a teacher. I have to make it interesting for all my students, my explanations need to be simple enough to reach the student with a low ZPD, but then I need to provide a challenging question for my higher level student. So I teach a concept, then give a “what if” scenario and have them discuss it. My hope is that all students expand their knowledge of what I am teaching. Sometimes, this is most effectively done in groups, sometimes one on one. I have heard the term called math talk, i.e. getting students to talk about what they are learning in math, using the right vocabulary, but I did not know about the concept of reciprocal teaching until I read this article. It ties to the theory by Vygotsky that students learn by social interaction. We as teachers need to create an environment that is geared towards interaction between students, whether it be pair-share, group work, or round robin discussions.