Edpuzzle is wonderful for sharing video assignments with students and prompting written response to questions. Here's an example of a project I used during my satire unit. Enjoy!
0 Comments
On the whole, this was an excellent and interesting read for those of us who are interested in facilitating genuine learning. I found Wagner’s arguments and anecdotes to be incredibly related to what I have observed in my classrooms. The youth he describes in this book are the same youth that I see coming in and out of my classroom every day. This book has certainly gotten me thinking about what kinds of changes and experiences I need to implement/facilitate within my classroom.
I think that it is very telling that the people who Wagner outlined in his book were not the kids who were classically successful students in school. But also, I think that we do need to realize that for every one of these people Wagner is referencing there are several kids who were successful in school and still successful as entrepreneurs. While it is a good idea to change our classroom approaches in order to promote more problem solving, it is not wholly a good idea to fetishize the school reform narrative that tells us that kids will just “get it” eventually if we leave them to their own devices and facilitate problem solving. It is our responsibility as teachers to know which learning situations require more authoritative approaches and which learning situations will allow teachers to take on a facilitative role in the classroom. Ideally, teachers would always be facilitators and let students take full ownership of their knowledge. So then the question becomes: how to we, as educators motivate students so that we can move into more facilitative roles more consistently? In the third section of the book, Chapters 5-6, Tony Wagner gets into the meat of the argument. Basically, we need to abolish traditional modes of learning that are largely prescriptive and content-based. We need to focus more on letting kids experiment and play to learn the process of creating knowledge rather than just being able to recall knowledge.
“To be a successful science teacher, you have to make it fun, and for kids that means making it theirs--so that they have ownership over what they are learning. It’s what motivates them. The other problem is that teachers think that, in order to cover the state standards, they have to give students all the answers, instead of having students discover the answers on their own. The most important thing is allowing students to ask questions and then give them space to find the answers. They will actually retain more of the content by learning in this way.” (p. 149) This points to a truth I have been discovering my whole year of student-teaching. Students don’t want to be told to fill in a worksheet and know something for a test (most of them don’t, anyways). Still, I see a lot of educators taking the banking approach to education, wherein they are “depositing” valuable knowledge directly to students, expecting that this will prepare kids for being successful and thoughtful adults. That being said, there is so much validity in the fear that teachers will not be able to cover all of the standards of their content area in a given year. I think that to truly change the way we approach the dilemma of transmitting information as an expert vs. coaching students through the discovery of information, we need to somehow figure out how to make the systemic changes to how we measure student and teacher achievement. Until then, however, we are always going to be taking part in a tricky balancing act to be effective and engaging educators. “...you can’t manage innovators the way that you used to manage folks in manufacturing--with command and control. Innovators don’t want to be managed. They want to work with a group of people whom they respect and solve customer problems that are intrinsically interesting to them.” (p. 230) Again, I have chosen this quote because it speaks to my experience in the classroom. Students work the best, and produce the most creative results, when they are problem solving with peers about real problems. Being an English teacher, my “real” problems are never quite as concrete as I would like them to be; nonetheless, I find that students are prone to engage in deeper and more critical discussion when they can draw relations between literature and their personal lives and when they are allowed to support and build upon one another’s arguments. Final Reflection about the book: On the whole, this was an excellent and interesting read for those of us who are interested in facilitating genuine learning. I found Wagner’s arguments and anecdotes to be incredibly related to what I have observed in my classrooms. The youth he describes in this book are the same youth that I see coming in and out of my classroom every day. This book has certainly gotten me thinking about what kinds of changes and experiences I need to implement/facilitate within my classroom. |
AuthorTrevor Rawlings is an educator at Pinacate Middle School in Perris, CA. Archives
April 2018
Categories |