Standardized Education
In today's class, we talked about the concept of Standardized Education, a.k.a. one movement of several education styles.
As I mentioned in a previous article, this class includes many discussions constracted with more authentic opinions. (If you haven't seen the previous post about the class, here is the link.)
<The class is about>
Today's topic,Standardized Education, is established in 1600-1700s in Western history. Because of the industrial influence, this way of teaching developped with an assumption that the skills people need in the society is stable.
Although the idea of Standardized Education is considered as the classic and old compared to current educational standards, teachers still use this concept quite often. Some examples can be one-direction teaching, asking just a knowledge in test, and/or teachers write down everything on the cholkboard and ask students to copy them on notebooks. (It reminds me Japanese teaching style a lot... orz)
So, we discussed the reasons why current teachers still want to use the concept of Standardized Education.
- Philosophy of knowledge shapes a concept of learning
In the reading, "Engaging Minds" (Davis, 2015), the author explains that many people believe knowledge as a thing; something you can give to others.
In other words, for those who believe in the knowledge as a thing, their attitude might be "I have the answers, you should have known that because I have taught already, and you have to give it back to me."
This interpretation is very interesting for me as I feel this philosophy was pretty common in my school days. So agian, this is saying how we interpret knowledge does affect our teachings and students' leanings.
I also found out that despite most of Japanese teachers do not see any problems using worksheet in classes, which I also did in my practicum a lot, Canadian teacher candidates seemed to feel using worksheet as a factor of losing students’ engagement.
Then, what is the idea of knowledge looks like in this century?
In class, we confirmed that knowledge should be seen in students' minds; it means something should be made sense by students, not by teachers.
Therefore, one-way teaching or assessing only knowledge (e.g. multiple choice questions) shouldn't be encouraged in this era.
Ideally, what teachers should ask students for will be
- the skills of application by uterlizing the knowledge students have accumulated, and
- attitude of being curious about the topic.
Yet, this idea might not always welcomed or understood by paretns. (Actually many Canadian teachers are questioned by parents, saying "give more drill work so that my children can do well" or "I don't care the mark of art subjects (,which enhances crativity though!!), but let them do more math or sciences") I sort of understand what parents comment about, for this is how we get adults. However, parents generations need to recodnize students should be allowed to try multiple approaches, and be more engeged into the learning rather than come school and do drill work.
It is also said that the role of teachers (teaching) have changed from the time that people have to be fit in a certain framework to be succeeded.
Students used to gain the knowledge by copying what teachers write on the board back in the day, but the important role for current teachers is shifting on engaging students into learning. Teachers provide learning opportunities to allow studetns to make sense in their own minds, encouraging students to associate their experiences or knowledge they had been constructed with new learning.
2. A sense of security affects teaching styles
Teachers see Standardized Education is supposed to be avoided. On the other hand, at some points, teachers like to use it. For example, many teachers still ask multiple choice questions for testing studetns' knowledge, still follow the curriculum all the time, or still expect students to get the goals in the certain ways.
These are implemanted because
- there is an assumption that teachers should know and give the right answers;
- teachers are afraid of out of controll by asking opened questions;
- teachers want a sense of security, which allow them to expect what studetns would response; and/or
- teachers feel pressure from authorities (it could be parents and/or provincial curruculum expectations)
But, the critical question here is "is this really a teachers' responsibility for studetns to know the right answers?"
In today's class, professor told us that the role of teacher is engaging studetns into the learnig; however, getting studetns to the cgoal should depend on each student. Again, if the knowledge should be possessed by studetns, teachers' job would be listening to what they have known/experienced so that students can see the connections to the new learning.
It makes sense at some points, yet this might not work all the time such as language/grammar class. (It requires a lot of practice as well as understanding the new knowledge)
Some times teachers do need to focus on knowledge understandings to develop students’ thinking (among math, science, language, history etc)
<Last comments>
These conversations are really interesting for me and gave me an opportunity to think about what my philosophy of teaching is. If the concept of knowledge shapes teaching/learning, the belief that the more you have experiences of teaching, the more better teacher you are won’t come along with it. Then it is the principle/ idea of knowledge that creates teachers’ teaching style.
BTW, I wanted to post this article in Japanese to make it easier to reflect on later, I couldn't do it since I'm in the library and using a computar there (of course, the keyboad doesn't have a function to enter Japanese...) Hope this would help someone and future-myself to think about teaching and learning.
追記:
やっとスマホさんから日本語で追記がかけます。笑笑
教師個人の「知識の概念」が、子供の学びにこれだけ影響を与えるんだって、ディスカッションを通して改めて思いました。「知識」なんてなか慣れ過ぎてしまった言葉を疑ったことがなかったから、「知識」って何？って聞かれると、困ってしまった一方で、これを教員自身が突き詰めることのインパクトにも鳥肌が立ちました。
ディスカッションを通して、知識とは「物として継承される」という概念とはまた別に、「個人個人で意味をなし形成されるもの」という概念も理解することが出来ました。
だから大切なのは子供が「経験」して自分の五感を使って自分の体験に落とし込むこと。聞く、読む、話しをする、書く機会を積み重ねて、それらを新しい学びと関連づける力。知識の概念が後者になると、自然と体験型学習やProject Based Learning (PBL) の提唱にも納得がいきますね。
