Content Versus Skill
Teaching today requires a vastly different approach than it did just 20 or 30 years ago. No longer is the teacher the expert who tells the student what they need to know. No longer is the student the passive receptacle into which information is poured. In today’s world you get by not based on what you know but what skills you have. Thus teaching students to thrive in today’s society requires a shift in thinking and in priorities.
We as teachers have spent so much of our time debating what our students should learn that we have constantly overlooked how they learn it. With information so readily available at the click of a mouse we need to shift our paradigm. I feel almost blasphemous saying, but I am starting to care less and less about what content knowledge my students have. Five years ago I probably would have told you that it was important to me that my students be able to accurately describe the parts of a cell. Today I am less concerned about that and more concerned about their ability to successfully find that information when they need it.
When I say that successfully find the information I mean they can not only find the information, but they can critically evaluate the source and compare it with other sources and their preexisting knowledge. If we can shift our focus to this type of education we can truly help our students stay competitive in an increasingly smaller global workforce.
November 6th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I completely agree…Your thoughts bring me back to the “Teach a man to fish” theory. To prepare our students for the myriad possible educational, professional, and personal paths they may find themselves on in their future lives, we must pass on to them not a pile of fish, nor, to stretch the metaphor even further, a single fishing pole. We must teach them how to be fishermen: how to find out what kind of fish they want, where they can find it, how to select the best tools and techniques with which to catch it, and even how to safely prepare it. Hmm…a language arts teacher run amuck, I’m afraid…but you follow the basic idea.
Kim Cofino has an excellent and more thorough discussion of just what kind of understandings we need of the skills our students need for the 21st century.