"More and more, though, as I look at my own kids and try to make sense what’s going to make them successful, I care less and less about a particular teacher’s content expertise and more about whether that person is a master learner, one from whom Tess or Tucker can get the skills and literacies to make sense of learning in every context, new and old. What I want are master learners, not master teachers, learners who see my kids as their apprentices for learning. Before public schooling, apprenticeship learning was the way kids were educated. They learned a trade or a skill from masters. When we moved to compulsory schooling, kids began to learn not from master doers so much as from master knowers, because we decided there were certain things that every child needed to know in order to be “educated.” And we looked for adults who could impart that knowledge, who could teach it in ways that every child could learn it."
Last Thursday morning I traveled to Vancouver to speak with Mark Bricklin, a reporter for the Vail Daily (Vail, Colorado), who was covering elements of the 2010 Winter Games for the newspaper. Okay, I didn't really go there in person but used Skype to transport two classrooms of students to the Media Press Center. The original plan was to contact Mark from one of the venues but a wireless connection was not reliable for this meeting.
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Via Professor Michael Wesch's blog.
I am a fan of the Office and thought this was hilarious the first time I watched it. But as I watched it a second time I was more reflective. Watching the "teacher" move from writing on the white board with a marker to presenting with a PowerPoint, distributing content on 3.5 inch floppy disks, or using Skype to display his image, doesn't really change the instructional delivery. Still teacher delivering and students absorbing.
Experts practice common habits. Among them are...
- Asking good questions
- Breaking problems into parts
- Looking for patterns
- Relying on evidence
- Considering other perspectives
- Following hunches
- Using familiar ideas in new ways
- Collaborating with others
- Welcoming critique
- Revising repeatedly
- Persisting
- Seeking new challenges
- Knowing yourself
Looking at this list, I can't help but ask if we are explicitly teaching these habits to our students? How do you teach these in your professional position?




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