Leaning by teaching.
An important learning principle is, of course, involved here: when we explain
something to others, we understand it better ourselves. And I'm quite sure that
this goes for teachers as well. The effort involved in preparing a tutorial, or
a lesson, or even adapting existing material to our particular needs is effort
devoted to making sense to ourselves, to making sure we understand what we intend
to teach.
The negative (or at least "less positive") side of this shows up often
when we view the elementary grades blogosphere. There surely must be thousands
of classrooms where impressive (and lots of less impressive) student work is displayed
on the walls. But within a classroom setting this work is going to be viewed only
by the teacher, by the pupils and perhaps by some of the parents. Since most of
us are never going to view the vast majority of this material (there's hardly
any reason for a teacher to invite outsiders to take a look inside the classroom)
we can comfortably state that what's displayed there doesn't concern, or interest,
us.
But it's becoming more and more popular to make this classroom material of this
sort public via blogs. And the logical assumption is that if it's being made public,
it's something that the teacher feels is of value to others beyond the classroom
walls - beyond the teacher, the classroom and the parents. Often, it isn't. I've
had the opportunity to view work of this sort, and even to pass (hopefully positive)
judgment on it. Sadly, the best than can be said is that the vast majority is
derivative, that it's early drafts of work that pupils should be encouraged to
continue to develop before making it public. But why should we expect it to be
anything other than derivative. It is, after all, work by pupils. If they were
already experts in producing a finished product, they probably wouldn't need to
be in school. Chances are good that copy/pasted work would
be much more impressive, but for pupils, as with teachers, the learning process
that takes place as they attempt to make sense of what they're writing is the
important part.
Go to: Who's the boss, or
Go to: Inventing wheels in cyberspace.