2012년 4월 22일 일요일

Melissa's Blog #5 Article Review 1


The Classroom Is Obsolete: It's Time for Something New
By Prakash Nair

In this article, Nair states that the classroom is a relic from the industrial age, and that no amount of reform will improve student achievement unless it radically changes the classroom as we know it. He says ,“The research demands a personalized education model to maximize individual student achievement. Classrooms, on the other hand, are based on the erroneous assumption that efficient delivery of content is the same as effective learning.” How would this classroom look? Nair believes the stakeholders in education (from parents, students, and teachers to elected officials and business leaders) should be involved in the discussion. Although each community might come up with different principles of education, Nair has listed 12 of the most essential ones. The educational principles in the article were things like inquiry-based, student-directed, collaborative, interdisciplinary, hands-on, environmentally conscious, and offering strong connections to the local community and business while still networking globally. He advocates involving community members and businesses more in the students' education, not breaking the day up into blocks, and having multiple teachers and even parents working with the students.

I like the idea of not breaking the day up into blocks because if students know they’re leaving each class after an hour, they often try to simply endure it and then move on. It’s not enough time for a teacher or a student to really explore a subject or concept. If students could work on a project for more than one hour everyday, they could produce something to be proud of. Once you become an adult and leave school (unless you are a teacher), your day is no longer broken up into short segments of time. In most jobs, professionals work within longer time constraints in order to get the work done properly. I also like an interdisciplinary approach because subjects work together. Language Arts will be involved in every single project a student does, and there are very few projects that don’t involve technology. The other subjects also do not exist separately from each other, and most can quite easily complement each other. I am definitely in favour of changing the modern school in a radical way because our students, our teachers, our society, and our global community have changed our world so much that traditional education isn’t standing the test of time. These days, students don’t always see the value in education. They have access to as much information as the teacher does, making the opportunity for collaborative learning an easy and practical approach. 

댓글 1개:

  1. I see your point and totally agree with you. We are not teaching our kids as if we are producing drones from a factory. But our current educational system does exactly that. We need to change the modern school in a radical way but with teachers' guidance.

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