As I am finishing my education and will be entering the teaching profession, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the typical, traditional setting of school classrooms and ways to change to the atypical, reform or constructivist model of teaching. Traditional classrooms, as we all know and were subjected to, are teacher-centered and focus on the teacher’s active role as a dispenser of knowledge. Teachers provide direct instruction and use tests to measure learning, while children are passive learners, working independently, usually practicing skills by completing fill-in-the-blank worksheets.
In a constructivist classroom the teacher’s role is to engage students with experiences so that they construct their own knowledge and modify their schemata. The classroom is student-centered and children are active learners, connecting what they learn to their own lives, literature they have read and what is going on in the world.
The tech-savy generation of students that I will be teaching do not know life without wireless Internet, DVD’s, gaming devices and cell phones. Yet, when they enter the typical classroom it is as if they have walked back in time. Although many schools are now equipped with computers at least somewhere on their campus, students are faced with an incredible inconsistency, daily, between their home-life and their school-life.
Repairing the mismatch of technology use in students lives between home and school-life makes sense, is beneficial for the students and is helpful for teachers.