Traditional education tends to relegate students to the role of consumers, of passive recipients of knowledge, which is seen as something to be delivered by the teacher (with the aid of secondary sources such as authoritative textbooks). Over the years, the underlying assumptions of this model about how learning takes place have increasingly come under criticism, but while many call for an overhaul of the teacher’s role - from “Sage on the Stage” to “Guide on the Side” - this is still effectively the model according to which many classrooms operate. The critics further argue that schools need to upgrade the students’ role to active co-producers of learning and knowledge.
This is not really a new debate, of course, but technology is rapidly increasing the range of ways in which this may happen. The last few years have placed amazingly powerful new tools in the students’ hands, and outside the four walls of the classroom, many of them are writing, creating digital art and videos, and even making games - some of them of surprising cognitive complexity - and all of it for a real audience. Sitting in our classrooms is a generation of students for whom video, audio and image production for publication on the Internet is an everyday occurrence. They are not the students many of us think we are teaching. Should this realization change what happens in the classroom?
According to the new NETS standards for students (which ISM will be implementing over the next few years), our classes should offer our students ample opportunity to:
demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.
and also to:
interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts or others employing a variety of digital environments and media.
Interestingly, during the chat session after the keynote address in the K-12 Online conference (which I wrote about in a previous post), one of the attendees was a (very mature) 14-year old boy named Arthus, who suggested that teachers should “hand over the microphone to students” and should try to be ‘directors of learning‘ more than ‘teachers‘. I suspect most of the 110 teachers who were engaged in that chat session were already thinking along these lines, but it was still pretty powerful to be hearing it directly from a student.
How often do we ask our students what they think of the teacher and student roles? How often do we let our students participate in shaping the classroom dynamics and responsibilities? How often do we ask the students to help us understand better how kids learn these days? How often do we “give a megaphone to our students”, as one participant said? While giving students a more active, creative role in shaping their learning process can improve their interest and enthusiasm, I believe it also has the potential to improve the quality of their learning.
One practical step in the right direction might be to accord more value to, and make better use of, students’ work. Traditionally, students write for an audience of one: the teacher. However, teachers know from firsthand experience that we learn best when we teach something - the learning is deeper and more enduring when we not only have to understand something, but also have to explain it, often in several different ways to accommodate different learners’ needs.
Why not give students more opportunities to become experts at something and then to teach each other? One way for this to happen is to provide them with opportunities to produce for a wider audience, in the form of text, audio or imagery. If they know that their work will be used by others, it takes on a whole new meaning.
For example, our library database here at ISM contains not just books by published authors, but also some work produced by ISM students. More specifically, high-scoring Extended Essay papers from past students have been archived in the library and can be checked out just like books.
Why not also include other quality digital projects that our students create, such as podcasts, videos, slideshows and more? How much more exciting wouldn’t it be for students to create works that may become part of our shared knowledge database and may be integrated in the curriculum as valuable learning resources in coming years?
We have a media server for storing videos, and podcasts can be freely stored online for all posterity. Any student-made resource that can be tagged under one or more topic headings can go into the database, and will then come up in database queries for those keywords, e.g. “EDSA revolution”, “Binary-to-hexadecimal conversion”, “A comparative study of Harry Potter and Othello”, or whatever else students write about. Keep this in mind the next time you assign such projects as podcasting or making videos or flash movies or even something as mundane as PowerPoint slideshows - any digital work that could potentially be of value to other students can very easily be stored and made accessible to others.
More on this to follow as we work out procedures and guidelines for determining what goes into the library database…
