My foray into gaming with myself as student (see Blog 2 http://mylifeasanon-gamer.blogspot.com/ ) and through discussions with Ian Chia http://sendfelicity.com/being_prudence.html) an idea is percolating. I don't quite have a handle on it yet, but I need to toss it out there. What if the best role for educators is not as teacher, deliverer of curriculum; not as facilitator of learning, but as participant learner? What if the teacher was actively demonstrating how he or she was learning? What if the teacher kept metacognitive journals, wrote stories, conducted research, and shared this process openly with students. What if students saw educators not as teachers, but as learners? What affect would that have on education?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
ShareThis
21 Century Classroom: The Amaryllis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://heidisiwak.blogspot.com/.
I loved this post when I read it! It just makes sense. We learn alongside and with our students no matter what age they are. Our class has a class blog and individual blogs and they suggested I put my professional learning blog on the list too. They are 9 and 10 year-olds. They said that they might not always understand what I'm on about, but it shows that I'm a learner alongside them too. Powerful. :-)
ReplyDeleteHi Justine,
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to comment.
Out of the mouths of babes! I don't think students are truly aware of just how much learning we do. Great idea to include your professional blog alongside your student ones.
I realize that you wrote this over a year ago... (on a side note, at this point last year I had just given birth...) however... this is an interesting question, as I think at times teachers assign work and don't necessarily know how to complete it themselves eg when I last worked on a math concept I assigned to my students I was 10 years old, which is 30 years ago, using different resources..... Teachers would benefit from sitting down with the students and working alongside with them on some of the work. I am not sure how I will develop this concept in my classroom, but am intrigued with the idea of teacher as participant learner. I have always embraced my role as facilitator, how this shift in thinking leads to a more active teaching model.
ReplyDeleteIt's nice when older posts still find an audience. Becoming a learner alongside students shift everything in the classroom. It allows you to engage with learners in a completely different way.
ReplyDelete