EDLD5364+Week+One

As I watched the introductory videos for this course, I thought about how each of the theories impacted me personally and how I had seen each one in my own experiences. Then I realized that was modeling one of the theories! The articles/readings talked so much about constructivism, and how it is tied to learner-centered classrooms. The goal for our students (hopefully) is to become well-rounded adults capable of living and working in society after they finish school. Teaching them in ways that allow them to collaborate and think for themselves and make their own decisions is a much better approximation of the future workplace than in a traditional "sit and get" classroom. Giving students choice and allowing them to be problem solvers is vital to creating future productive adults. Students (and all people) have a prior base of learning and personal experience. We do not start with a clean slate when we set out to educate children. We as educators need to be in touch with where are students are coming from and the lens through which they view the content that we are trying to communicate. This can in turn help us understand why some content is hard for students to assimilate. So often, students are told to saty seated and be quiet. In the learner-centered classroom, we see students talking and active. What a paradigm shift! This model encourages student choice and active engagement, which gets students to be truly excited about learning, maybe for the first time.

Incorporating technology is a natural outgrowth of the learner-centered classroom. Technology can facilitate collaboration, reflection, and give access to real time data not available in books and libraries. Social networking can become a tool in the classroom, though up to this point it has been largely vilified in education. In my school we can not think about the word "Facebook," so the social networking tools and connected benefits are lost to us as educators and more importantly, to our students. There are many new technologies that are being embraced in the educational world, and the research tells the story. Students involved in these research-based models of learning are able to problem solve (and perform on all important state assessments) as well or better than students who do not. Technology in the learner-centered classroom opens up the world to our students, quite literally. The internet can allow students to share ideas with other students as well as experts from around the world. Teachers can become leraners alongside their students, which can be exciting and a little intimidating. Fusing technology and the learner-centered classroom also mirrors the workplace that our students will be entering in the not too distant future. They will be using technologies that we never dreamed of in jobs that we have not yet heard of. Technology will be an underlying theme more and more for work and for life, so education should be preparing students for that eventuality.