Pedagogical Possibilities for ICT

TEACHING STUDENTS TO BE LEARNERS

If you are a devoted schoolteacher in the 21st century, what should be your essential mission, main professional calling, and foremost pursuit?

The answer is in the wind: to teach students to become good learners.

What does this mean, functionally, as well as structurally? We would argue that a good learner is someone who is always alert, attentive, perceptive, responsive, and ready to be pro-active in grasping, digesting or assimilating a knowledge, skill or competence. This is true from kindergarten, elementary, middle school and high school, through years in college or university, and in all walks of adult life. If you really devote yourself to raising and tutoring such characters on a daily basis, let us consider some necessary theoretical cornerstones, technical requirements, and organizational prerequisites.

To make a good learner out of every student in your class, you may pick up and try tentatively alternate trails, tools, and methods. However, we have good reason to believe that it is wiser to adopt the strategy of what might be called the way of new schooling. Here it is in a nutshell:

1 Find at least two or three (better five to seven) colleagues at your own or other schools, who share your strivings and are willing to collaborate either close by or far off (e.g. via email exchange) to develop a project. Teachers who wish to pursue such a mission must intermittently transmute themselves into part-time researchers, designers and constructors of the new educational technologies. The argument for collaboration is simple: there is no one who can instruct contemporary teachers authoritatively and unilaterally on what to do in all particular, unprecedented and unique circumstances. Therefore, teachers must think and act on their own while trying to weave a web of interconnectedness and mutual assistance with as many concerned and knowledgeable people as possible.

2 Show students a variety of optional activities from which each is asked to choose a few that are challenging, alluring, and suitable to them personally.

3 Provide a friendly environment, materials, and tools with which students can tinker freely, if only by imitating by example.

4 Encourage students by means of informal conversation and discussion to exercise playfully their explorative curiosity, adroitness, and inventiveness, coupled with developing an awareness of what they are doing in the broader cultural-educational context. At this preliminary stage, both students and adults learn that a teacher can be not only a mentor, tutor, or instructor, but also an older, experienced, skilful, and responsible playmate with whom it is easy to communicate and interact.

5 Introduce some simple and attractive structured games with strict, explicitly defined rules relevant to the topic under study, and invite the students to play to win. Now students learn that the teacher can initiate them into new kinds of competitive play and games that enable students to demonstrate their wit and mental adroitness.

6 Make students aware that their success in playing these goal-oriented games depends upon their willingness, and acquired ability to observe – not break! – conventional rules they have accepted by mutual agreement. In this way, students learn how to turn the limitations and restrictions imposed by these rules into a springboard for reaching higher levels of resourcefulness and ingenuity. They come to treat the teacher as a respected game-leader, whose mastery they are hoping to equal some day.

7 Devise a series of more complicated, project-oriented games that are related to the consequent themes, topics, and tasks in various subject matters and implying a collaborative rather than competitive approach to problem solving.

At this stage, the game has been imperceptibly transformed. In fact, it will no longer be clear to anyone whether it is still a game or a cognitive, productive activity of a serious kind. Students, in their turn, will become more and more involved in mutually supporting, intellectually and emotionally rewarding teamwork for exploration, research, designing, testing and implementing their discoveries, inventions, and solutions, while seeing the teacher as a partner in real business and a competent master of the craft.

Division of Higher Education: ©UNESCO 2005