Teachers often complain that some children in class are just not interested in learning. They are not willing to put in the effort needed to learn.
Yet any of us who have taken care of a three year old know how physically and mentally tiring it can be to answer their incessant stream of questions and follow them as they go exploring the
environment.
Every waking moment in a toddler's life is spent on learning.
So are we as teachers saying that some children don't want to learn while actually implying that they do not want to learn in school?
Why should they - schools are contrived environments while the world outside is so much more rich, diverse, nuanced, dynamic and challenging.
Our schools and education system still equate education with acquiring information.
Knowledge is absolute, so a good student is someone who can download the knowledge, save it in memory and reproduce it as is, whenever needed. Learning is therefore all about obeying orders and following instructions. Moreover schools continue to function under the illusion that knowledge is available only in the class.
The world however is changing rapidly. While it took the radio over three decades to reach 50 million people, Facebook reached this number in just a couple of years.
Our children's world is one of instant information, communication, entertainment and collaboration. YouTube has over one billion page views per day and there are over 31 billion searches on Google every month.
We as teachers need to accept that knowledge can no longer be considered as absolute and unchanging. Neither can we continue to believe in ourselves as the fount of knowledge.
Instead, we need to view ourselves as facilitators - creating collaborative, inquiry-based learning experiences that will help students to gather, examine, validate, modify and extend knowledge. We need to support and guide them as they use the current knowledge to create new products and solutions as well as discover what is still unknown.
While this will have implications in the school design, classroom setting, practices and curriculum, the change will have to begin from the change in teachers' attitudes towards teaching and learning.
Yet any of us who have taken care of a three year old know how physically and mentally tiring it can be to answer their incessant stream of questions and follow them as they go exploring the
environment.
Every waking moment in a toddler's life is spent on learning.
So are we as teachers saying that some children don't want to learn while actually implying that they do not want to learn in school?
Why should they - schools are contrived environments while the world outside is so much more rich, diverse, nuanced, dynamic and challenging.
Our schools and education system still equate education with acquiring information.
Knowledge is absolute, so a good student is someone who can download the knowledge, save it in memory and reproduce it as is, whenever needed. Learning is therefore all about obeying orders and following instructions. Moreover schools continue to function under the illusion that knowledge is available only in the class.
The world however is changing rapidly. While it took the radio over three decades to reach 50 million people, Facebook reached this number in just a couple of years.
Our children's world is one of instant information, communication, entertainment and collaboration. YouTube has over one billion page views per day and there are over 31 billion searches on Google every month.
We as teachers need to accept that knowledge can no longer be considered as absolute and unchanging. Neither can we continue to believe in ourselves as the fount of knowledge.
Instead, we need to view ourselves as facilitators - creating collaborative, inquiry-based learning experiences that will help students to gather, examine, validate, modify and extend knowledge. We need to support and guide them as they use the current knowledge to create new products and solutions as well as discover what is still unknown.
While this will have implications in the school design, classroom setting, practices and curriculum, the change will have to begin from the change in teachers' attitudes towards teaching and learning.
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