We have a bit in common. You work with pre-service teachers. I do the professional development with teachers once they have a job in our school districts.

I think it’s important that despite the negative feedback you’re sticking to your student centered approach. If David’s comment above is true that the way a teacher teaches is most heavily influenced by how they were taught, which I believe is true, it becomes that much more important to lead by example and facilitate your class the same way you they should.

As more students start to model your student centered approach in their own classrooms it should become a domino effect and, hopefully, start to change the ineffective pedagogies used to effective ones where students take ownership of their own learning.

I think we’re all on the same page – do what we can to influence current teachers and teacher education faculty through professional development and modeling. And in my case, expose as many preservice teachers to our world (Web 2.0, Read/Write Web – or whatever you want to call it).

I know that I had great success with this approach in my last class. I had an excellent group of doctoral students who were clueless about Web 2.0 tools and their applications. But … by the end of the semester, they are teaching other teachers, requiring it of their students, and even conducting workshops.

This is the same group that were on the WOW2.0 (http://www.womenofweb2.com) webcast on April 17. You can find the link here: http://www.womenofweb2.com/weeklychats.htm. We had a wonderful time! I am so excited about what they are all doing now … one story:

One of the students deleted all the information from one of our class wiki pages. Instead of fixing it for him, (as we all know by now goes against my teaching philosophy) I told him to figure out how to get the information back. After a couple of attempts, and some help from his classmates, he was successful. About a week after the course was over I got an email from him telling me that he created a wiki to use with his sports team that was traveling out of the country. Now that’s fun to hear! A real victory for this high school teacher who was just introduced to the power of Web 2.0 tools.

But, I have CHOSEN to engage in the conversation, and there, I believe lies the rub in all of this. How do we encourage and nurture others to take the leap? It is daunting for most teachers, especially considering the testing pressures and burdens of time availability that seem to rule the day. Yet the image that sticks in my mind is the scene from The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the two pills and a choice – I am glad that I have chosen the red pill to see how deep the rabbit hole goes!

I’ve heard this before. It seems that people want to become teachers because they want to do what their favorite teachers did. I wish I could remember the source, but it seems that there was a study a while back concluding that of all the factors that contribute to how a teacher teaches, the one with the most influence was “how they were taught.”

It’s why the morphing of the conversation on my post is so important. It’s because of the technology, and even more because of how technology has changed our information landscape that the old teacher-centered pedagogies are no long relevant. Their exclusive use is actually counter productive. I think that this is the case we have to make. That teaching children how to be taught makes no sense to their future. Instead, we have to teach them to teach themselves.

Thanks for the continued conversation!

– dave –