A Teacher’s Thoughts

I have been thinking about this lately as I reflect on my own learning. Below is advice given to me by my graduate advisor (I studied Zoology).

• Try not to take classes.
• Pick an area you love.
• Figure out what is important.
• Read everything on that topic.
• Build a network of people who are working on the same or similar topics.
• Figure out what is missing.
• Use the missing information to ask a really good question.
• Figure out how to answer your question.
• Publish your answer.

I followed this advice and was transformed from a “student” to a life-long learner. Since then I have followed the same steps on a variety of topics. Why do I suggest that a “student” is different? Because I was a good student, with good grades but the model I learned to follow as a student was different:

• Classes are where all the learning happens. If there is no class, there is no learning.
• If it is in Bold print or on the board, it is important.
• Read a little about everything.
• Sit quietly and learn.
• If something isn’t in the book, we don’t cover it in this class.
• If you don’t know an answer, you may want to ask a question.
• Raise your hand and I will answer that question.

I was fortunate in my experiences and learning in graduate school. (Thank you Michelle, it is only recently that I have discovered the value of this advice.) This advice was given to me in 1992, not pre-web certainly but before the web was as truly information rich, before the participatory culture of today’s web 2.0 savvy had been born.

The heart of this is that new technologies such as blogs, wikis, skype, flickr, and YouTube, to name a very few, support a model of learning that is not new, that is rooted in the academics of research but had been traditionally reserved for those individuals working at that level. If our flattened world will place more value on skills of collaboration and information retrieval and management than traditional workforce skills, then shouldn’t the values I saw in a research culture permeate the culture of school? Which model do our classroom practices support? Which model does our school structure support? Which model is modeled in teacher training programs and graduate level teacher education?