I really enjoyed Gardner Campbell’s webcast. The one thing he said that really stuck out to me was, “education needs to be about discovery and not about instruction”. Too often students sit in class and are told what they should be learning in class. The students end up playing a game of guess what the teacher already knows instead of being truly motivated to learn something. Looking back to my own education the only time I ever really felt wonder while learning something I was in fourth grade. We were learning about magnets and we were making designs with metal shavings by moving the magnets underneath the desk. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced and I took a liking to Science after that. My teacher at the time didn’t have to go to great lengths to captivate us. She understood the lack of control in our own lives, so she provided us with something we could. Moving those metal shavings around on my desk for twenty minutes was the best part of my day.
There is mention of learning as a transaction- making learning a job to complete paired with anxiety instead of enjoying the learning process. Students resort to this theory of learning because it is ingrained in us that we are taught, we learn, we’re tested and then we move onto something else. In our educational journey not one teacher has asked us to learn for the sake of learning something new. There is always a reason we learn; a test that follows, an essay to write or a project to complete. We have never been asked to learn information because it’s nice to know things.
Campbell also states that offering students options gives them room to grow, room to play… to discover. While it gives them room to do all of the aforementioned, it also gives them ownership of their learning. By taking ownership of their learning they become the so called ‘system administrators’. But in order to foster this ownership of learning in our students we must also establish an openness with them. A reciprocal relationship of mutual trust where anything can be discussed or questioned. Student’s feel like they’re being judged when they walk into any classroom so by establishing this relationship with them it takes away the anxiety and allows them to be vulnerable. After all vulnerability is where the most crucial learning takes place.
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