Unlearning How to Teach

What do you make of the following:

Rather than teachers delivering an information product to be ‘consumed’ and fed back by the student, co-creating value would see the teacher and student mutually involved in assembling and dissembling cultural products. As co-creators, both would add value to the capacity building work being done through the invitation to ‘meddle’ and to make errors. The teacher is in there experimenting and learning from the instructive complications of her errors alongside her students, rather than moving from desk to desk or chat room to chat room, watching over her flock.

How much of what we learned about teaching either as a student observer or through a training program has to be pushed aside? The above excerpt challenges what was an accepted paradigm governing classroom instruction and for many of us, this was the learning environment we experienced as students.

When one considers what is valued in today's world, instruction needs to reflect an environment in which teachers and students are working together to solve complex problems. Within the quest to find possible solutions classroom participants have to be willing to experiment and construct a working process. Teachers have to see the value in working along side students and how each group of classroom participants can learn from one another. Students can benefit from watching teachers tackle a complex problem and see steps that are taken to build successful strategies. Sharing with students how educators learn needs to be seamlessly infused into the classroom.