In the past I have always viewed teachers,
as people who have gone to school and become practically experts on one or more
subjects in order to pass their knowledge on to their students. They must have nearly all the answers to the questions their students may ask on the
particular subject(s) in which the teacher specialized in. A teacher’s role as
students is over, they’ve learned what they needed to learn, and now their role
is to teach. However, David Warlick’s blog, Schools
that Practice Learning-Literacy has challenged my previous outlook on
teaching.
 |
| Photo credit on Flickr |
One of David Warlick’s ideas concluded
that the distinction between teacher and student are beginning to blur. In this
segment of his blog he explains that students learn better when they are actually teaching the material themselves. I found that I could relate to this.
In previous courses such as algebra, I enjoyed teaching other students, not
only because I wanted to help, but also because found that it helped me
understand and remember the material better. “No teacher will deny that we all
learned what we teach better, after we started teaching it, than we did as
students in the classroom”, this was one of David Warlick’s strong points. Another point of his discussion was
that there is less reliance on textbooks. As the years progress there is a much
larger variety of sources where students can get information. Textbooks used to
be almost the only source students would go to when learning and searching for
information. Textbooks are approved sources, where mainly everything is viewed
as an unquestionable fact. Now there are sources such as internet site, blogs,
twitter, and YouTube. This information can be questioned, leaving a lot more
room for interpretation and an open mind. This allows students to wonder and
use their own judgment, although I think this is great, it is also important
for students to understand not everything they read is reliable. Warlick also mentioned that
teachers should teach from new learning rather than what they learned while
they were in school. As we all know our educational information keeps changing
as technology is advancing. One of the main subjects affected by these changes
is science. Teachers cannot teach their students solidly on what they learned
in school, because so many new advances have changed a great part of the
information that they learned. Therefore it is important that teachers continue
to learn in order to be worthy and reliable teachers.
