It seems that nearly every day of teaching 8th grade students, in one way or another, a student questions how the content we are teaching them is going to be applicable to their future. Try as I might, I have not yet formulated the perfect response to this question. There is the obvious, "Well, it will be on your MCAS test, and you need to pass that to graduate from high school" or "You need this information to do well in high school and get into college". But those answers are not good enough. If we are going to continue to teach our students and assess our students as we did in the 20th century, we are doing them a great disservice. We do not need to teach them content because the content we are teaching them will change. Anything that we think they need to know,they can research on their iphone or smartphone, and find the answer, 5 minutes into our lesson. We do not need to assess them on the rote memorization of some content, because that is not a skill that is necessary to their future.
So, how do we teach students, so that we can have an impact on their "real life"? My thoughts are, we teach them how to effectively use the tools that they readily have at their disposal. We teach them how to take in information and decide what is relevant. We teach them how to decide what is fact and what is fiction. We teach them that there is more than one answer to every problem, or at least more than one way to arrive at an answer. In essence, we teach them how to think.
In a true 21st Century Classroom, I could answer the question, "How will we use this in real life"? by saying. "You will use this every day of your real life when you are confronted by a problem, concern, or issue and you know how to arrive at a solution".
I am so happy that I do not have to face these questions everyday from my kiddos. They are perfectly content just learning how to read and add and subtract. I remember when I was in high school, many students asked these questions and we were not surrounded my this much technology. It must be so frustrating as a teacher to be facing these questions and to have students able to take out their phone and find answers instantaneously. I agree that our job as teachers is to teach students how to think and how to use the tools they have available to them.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering if that question, "how will I use this in real life?"
ReplyDeletewill disappear in the 21st century classroom setting. I agree that teaching them to use the tools available is very important. Given that many of the tools are in technology, I believe that students come to school already motivated to use these tools and are curious to learn how to further develop the use of these tools. In today's world, students can already see the wonderful inventions and innovations that have come about as people learn to use these tools and improve upon them. The basics, such as reading, writing, math, etc. become secondary in a sense. Students understand that these subjects are more the means to gain access to the wonderful tools of technology.
When I started teaching, I used to ask my students, "Who is smarter...a person who knows the definition of a word or knows how to find the definition in the dictionary?" Well, the dictionary reference may be fading, but the concept is quite relevant. This is why I constantly push myself to learn new technology. As teachers, we have an obligation to teach students how to navigate all the information available, so that they may become life-long learners and problem solvers.
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