“The fundamental role of a teacher is not to deliver information, it is to guide the social process of learning. ..The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn. The most important thing a teacher does is make every student feel like they are important,to make them feel accountable for doing the work of learning.?”
Getting the role of the teacher right is really, really important.
And getting it wrong leads to all kinds of problems.
One way our education reform movement (and, to be honest, just about everyone else) gets it wrong is imagining teachers’ function to be simply “delivering content.”
This leads to problems in the classroom. Students are treated as passive recipients of content that is then superficially assessed via tests. The students themselves, their lives, the contexts they live in, their aspirations, are not important. What becomes important is the technical question of how to best “deliver content,” and then how to measure our effectiveness in doing so. What matters is content delivery and assessment. This is what I and others label “learnification.”
It is simply bad pedagogy.
Am I overstating this? Read your newspapers, check your local district’s ranking, and get back to me.
In this bad pedagogy, in our current world…
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 