"It shouldn't take a crisis or disaster to help us learn that goodness and talent are something we hold in common as humans. There are quieter and simpler ways to learn who somebody is, what their talents are, how their life challenges them. For instance, we can sit down and talk with them."
- Margaret J. Wheatley, Turning to One Another
This quote highlights the importance of getting to know my students. I can study learning disabilities, issues of power dynamics in the classroom and in society, how to classroom manage, etc and still never know a student. A student is never defined by a label. If I want to know how best to facilitate a students learning, I must ask them how. Students know how they learn best and teachers overlook this all the time. It is difficult to rely on someone else, especially someone we typically see in a learning role, but this is how students teach us. Talking to students is simple, yet teachers often rely on their theoretical knowledge in place of it. I want to talk to my students.
"The interaction with peers was the most beneficial part of the workshop."
- Quote within Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide by Sharan B. Merriam, Rosemary S. Caffarella, Lisa M. Baumgartner
This sentiment reminds me that the information I intend to teach in class and the interaction with myself as a teacher is not always what is going to be the most important part of a student's learning process. People place quite a lot of importance on their social interactions, especially growing up. How they are interacting with others is going to affect how they are learning and if it is meaningful to them. It's also going to be a tool I use to increase understanding. I believe in working in small groups in order to have discussions that people may be uncomfortable with in a larger setting. Allowing students to have their own communities of practice will enhance their classroom experience both socially and content-wise.
"Learning, then, is a normal physiological and psychological activity that does not require external pressure or encouragement to begin and that proceeds out of inner drives fuelled by intrapersonal energy rather than out of external pressure fuelled by rewards and punishments. The basic problem confronting any facilitator is not how to motivate learning - since it happens both normally and naturally - but rather how to avoid setting up disincentives and obstacles that retard, block, or demotivate learning."
- Dorothy MacKeracher, Making Sense of Adult Learning
The idea of students being naturally motivated to learn and teachers sometimes being obstacles to that process resonates with me. This is not the mindset I had coming into the Education program. I assumed a teacher's primary responsibility was to motivate students to learn and that if they weren't, it was my job to come up with other motivation techniques. The concept of removing teaching techniques as an obstacle is a student-centered approach, which is how I want to conduct my classes. If a teacher thinks a child's way of learning is disabled, that teacher is setting up a roadblock for that students learning that will show through in how the teacher interacts with the student and the filter he or she sees the student through. The student's way of learning is not disabled - it is the teacher's perception and assumptions about the student that are.
Of interest to me...
All these quotes from my 408 textbook are focused on adult learning. The way in which I related to them was through a teaching perspective. This is interesting to me because as a lifelong learner, I will be both teaching and learning simultaneously. I can transfer theories behind adult education to a high school or elementary classroom because the theories place the student at the centre of education.