Priority of Education Questions
Priority of Education Questions (Warlick 17)
1. What should students learn?
2. How should students learn?
3. How well are students learning?
I think this is an interesting order of priority questions. What to teach is certainly a hard question to answer. But without knowing what exactly we're teaching students, and we have to rule out assumptive teaching, how do we know if their learning anything at all? I'm curious to see how Warlick answers these questions in his book Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century. Since we're talking about the 21st century I'm assuming he is going to tell us to teach things like blogging and wikis to our students.
I think the most important question ELA teachers are facing is: How do you incorporate current technology into your classroom?
This question is important because technology is ever changing. Our students will always be at least one step ahead of us when it comes to technology. Not only that but as Richardson discusses, we need to make sure our students are using technology and internet resources "safely." It is a huge risk for new teachers to take. That audible gasp from one student could bring in a great amount of parent phone calls and/or unhappy administrators. Technology is important to try to use in the classroom, but it's also important to make sure clear rules are set for students to use the technology safely.
posted by Lauren at 6:39 PM
1 Comments:
You raise several issues here Lauren. The "what" question --- I would appreciate hearing more about how you would pose an answer to that question after student teaching. You are in a unique position to do that on your blog.
To deconstruct your student teaching experience.
I would argue that blogging and wiki-ing are not the "what" Warlick (or any of these authors) would suggest answers the what question. Surely these are important tools we might use to increase student responsibility for their own learning with a challenging "what." Notice I'm avoiding answering that question for any of us.
IS the most important question we face the question of technology? Or is technology and how we use it a stop along the way to answering that question?
Does the question have more to do with multiple and "new" literacies and multi-modal learning?
We ELA teachers are the literacy experts, not the technology experts. Now, in a 3.0 world surely these two areas of expertise have to go hand in hand to some degree but I'll take the literacy expert over the technology expert any day of the week if I'm hiring a new ELA teacher.....
Some things to think about...
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