A valuable lesson brought up in class this week was the concept of letting a student learn for themselves. A mistake that teachers can sometimes make is ‘over teaching’. They drown the students in information and directives, which robs the student of the experimental learning process. From what I’ve seen of education, far too many teachers will not allow their students to realize concepts for themselves, but rather cram information into them which is to be regurgitated a designated time in the future, and then very often forgotten forever. However, if a teacher is available to offer guidance to the student as they stumble and find their footing within a given subject or concept, the student can make mistakes for themselves and learn from them. The student should hopefully not only be able to reproduce the information from memory, but understand it as well, which can only come from within.
Darin M.
Although I said something similar in my Pedagogy Forum, I really appreciate how you isolate one of the main issues in teaching writing. I have students who complain all of time, "But, so and so told us to do it that way!"-crash of pencil, paper in floor, student leaves mad and defeated. Teachers, myself included, so often get wrapped up in writing for a specific purpose (the Georgia High School Writing Test, Writing Contests, the SAT, etc) that we forget to teach students the actual purpose of their own writing at all. Students are always amazed when we take time to actually discuss what writing can be, a dialogue, a process, a learning tool, an outlet, etc. Students fail to understand the differences in writing for purpose because they do not understand the fundamentals of why they write in the first place. Wouldn't it be great to have students write their own writing mission statement at the beginning of a class? Then, as facilitators, we could help them reach their goals. Thanks for that insight Darin M.
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