Thursday, August 29, 2013

Journal Post 1

Review on David Warlick's "Schools that Practice Learning-Literacy"

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.