Pam Callahan’s EDUC628 Blog
Online Education Course
Educational Thoughts of the Day
While browsing through my reader, I came across two related ideas about effectively teaching students that I wanted to share.
http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/quote-o-the-day-4/
I really liked this thought provoking quote from Stephen Downes: “Personal learning becomes possible because everybody – and not just teachers – can teach. Why does this matter? This: we should not be teaching our students using video, we should be teaching our students to use video, not so they can be better students, but so they can be better teachers.”
If only there was a way to revolutionize education so that we could teach our students to teach themselves. I believe technology can provide this opportunity, but only if the teacher can create activities that help students help themselves. I try to come up with activities that I feel will help my students be better learners, but the time constraints limit the number of activities that I can do. I have hoped for the past two summers to sit down and revamp my curriculum so that it is more student-centered, but after I finish my Upward Bound teaching, the time flies by and I am teaching again without having done this task.
Has anyone done an activity that you felt like helped your kids teach themselves that you would like to share? I am looking for ideas to enhance my own teaching (i.e., looking to steal ideas).
Clarence Fisher writes an interesting blog entry at Remote Access about educating students:
http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2008/01/education-shoul.html
He says education should be simple. We should be catering to kids’ curiosity as a way of teaching them. Yet the politics of education does not agree with this. We need to be able to concentrate on the humanness of education and not so much the statistics of education. His entry and the comments posted afterwards are well worth reading.
January 19th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I attended a Math Cadre meeting this week at KEDC and one of the discussions we had was the fact students are given very little time to explore and investigate things on their own. Without this exploration it is very difficult to make sense of the concept you are learning. One teacher remarked how many of her students didn’t even know what to do when they were given time to explore with manipulatives and discover things for themselves. When given this opportunity I think you are promoting the natural curiosity of children.
As teachers we often teach first and then let the students see if we’re right. Of course this is usually done because of time constraints.
Self teaching happens when we take the time to ask questions and explore on our own to find the answers!
January 19th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Pam, I totally agree, some of the best learning that I have every done is when I am teaching others. I must admit, I haven’t found a really good activity that has students really teaching other yet that I found really works. Now in my lab, I often have students help other students, but that of course must be monitored because I often find them just doing it for them instead of showing them. But I agree that if we could create little “teachers”, we would probably have better “students”.
I love Remote Access and I feel challenged by Clarence’s statement that education should be simple. It seems everyday that we try to find ways to either complicate a simple process or we re-invent the wheel. If I get one more email from our Superintendent that our goal is to RAISE TEST SCORES I am going to puke! I would love to but let’s now lost the focus of what we are doing here. Now I will get off my soapbox.