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Too Much to “Teach”

March 28, 2012 By Will Richardson

It’s early, and I’m trying to make some brain cells come together in a coherent thought. Help me out, ok?

Some truths/assumptions:

1. Schools have to act as if every child has easy access to the Web or will have it sooner rather than later. For now, we have to provide it to those that don’t, but more importantly, we have to provide to every student the skills, literacies and dispositions that will help them flourish in a content, knowledge, and teacher-rich networked world regardless their current level of access to it. 

2. Given the ever expanding scope of knowledge and information we have access to, suggesting that we know what to “teach” every student from a content perspective is highly problematic. Certainly, we need to “teach” the basics of reading and writing and math. Beyond that, however, our focus has to be on dealing with all of that information and knowledge rather than parsing out specific chunks of it to deliver.

3. Given that there is too much to teach, the traditional idea of the “teacher” is moving toward obsolescence. Instead of preparing the adults to be teaching “professionals” who are adept at a highly structured delivery of education, we need to prepare them to be “learning professionals” who have deep expertise in inquiry, literacy, information retrieval and vetting, collaboration, creation etc. 

I think I’m trying to make a case for unlearning and relearning teaching, or, even, pushing it more to the sidelines. Ideas?

Remember, it’s early. Be gentle.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: education, learning, teaching

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