A favourite quote of mine:
"Our students should be asking questions more than giving answers"
Half way through the video, I had to go and complete some researching on John Dewey - an educational theorist from the turn of the 20th century. If I had encountered him before, I had unfortunately forgotten this educational visionary. A quote that I uncovered could have easily been from the latest twitter feed, but was written in 1897:
The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these. Thus the teacher becomes a partner in the learning process, guiding students to independently discover meaning within the subject area. This philosophy has become an increasingly popular idea within present-day teacher preparatory programs.
I was of the opinion that the reform (for want of a better word), that I thought I was part of (the movement from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side") was a movement away from teaching practices of the mid 20th century, toward a 21st Century model. How wrong was I? John Dewey was espousing such theory 100 years before I left secondary school and had no idea of the knowledge sharing and collaboration potential of the world wide web.
Check it out:
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