Please Give me a Reason to Find Out

Im guilty. Im guilty of setting up non authentic situations where I want my kids to learn. I create situations that are not real. Are unlikely to happen.  And I expect my learners to connect and make meaning and use the questions and the tools I have given them to figure out the answer that is unimportant to their lives and meaningless.  Yes Im guilty. Have you ever been guilty of this? It’s ok if you have.  I forgive you. We love what we do. It happens with the best intentions. We learn. We sometimes have to teach things in a non authentic environment. Thats the hardest part. Thats why we are professionals and are good at what we do.

Having this realisation quite a few years ago really changed my teaching. It’s actually made my job more difficult. I could no longer give kids meaningless tasks pretending (hoping) that they were learning something. I knew that the key to learning was through authentic situations and making learning meaningful. Thats pretty hard. I still struggle with it but knowing about it helps. Its a work in progress.

So far I think that we need to provide learners with an authentic experience and a real need to find information. We talk these so called ’21st century skills’ such as collaboration, problem solving and teamwork.  Resourcefulness to me is a major skill. It’s not so much about the content you an remember but how fast you can access and understand it. The key here is access.

Now more than ever before we need to be able to:

• Find information quickly
• Have a network to call upon and contribute to
• Check validity of information
• Sort and understand information quickly
• Make decisions on our findings

Authentic, real time learning and the skills to match.