This has been a interesting and busy week. We are to reflect on how what were learning affects our professional growth, etc.
What is interesting is that I am actually teaching online right now.... so I don't have a lot of direct influence with what my students use. I give them guidelines as to what file types I will accept, but other than that... it's up to them to find the best software fit for themselves. So in some respects I don't have a lot of say in what they use to do their projects.
Hoever, I am planning to use what I've been learning in this class and the revitalization it has provided me to share more resources (I've already shared some) with my students to provide them with alternatives to the standard file types they are supposed to use (RTF, DOC, TXT and PDF). Those are pretty.... boring when you really think about it. I mean, really....there are so many cool ways to accomplish things any more that I feel that my students are being limited by those file types. That is partly due to my employer, but I have been told if I allow other ways of turning things in (like Google Docs), that's fine. I plan collect several resources (and possibly some videos) that promote different ways of turning in work.
One related thing that came up when were were discussing Sir Ken Robinson's video was the fact that our textbook talks about learning being social. There is a strong emphasis on this and Sir Ken talked about hot the structure of schools can be a barrier to this. This got me thinking and then one of our group members posed this question: Do the standards help or harm learning?
This was a great question which set me off a little bit. IF indeed social learning is where it's at.... then do standards really matter THAT much? My father didn't have 1/100th the testing kids have today and he went on to law school. My mother went on to get her masters in library science. Also being in a career transition, the idea that you can teach hard skill but not soft ones keeps coming to mind. I can't teach someone not to be a jerk, but I can teach them how to make a Prezi.
Listening to some of my co-workers and thinking about when I taught... this pressure to constantly be teaching a standard is a lot of stress. However - the counter argument to this is ,"Well, you should be teaching them anyway...it's no different than what you already do." I agree with this, but when put on the spot there are people who can quote the standards verbatim and creatively explain how they match up. There are other people who are doing the standard but can't see that they are to be able to show they are. So, if that's the case... what is the push towards standards and testing really all about? Is it about segragating our students by ability down the road? Is it about their learning? Is it about their teacher's teaching? Or is it about treating schools as businesses and trying to hold them to a business model even when there are so many differences between the two that there is no possible way to make it work?
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I completely agree about the standards. I work with a teacher that I swear knows all the standards by heart. I may not know them on demand but when I look over them I can honestly say I am meeting them... even if I don't necessarily know which specific ones for every moment of teaching.
ReplyDeleteKnowing the standards doesn't make you a better teacher necessarily but they should at least be in the back of our mind when planning lessons. I try to match them but focus more on what my students need. By doing this I find that often I meet and exceed what the standards say my students should know.