This statement is true because although we as teacher want to give students the control to work through problems together, it is often difficult to necessarily trust them to control what they are doing. It's hard to know exactly where a conversation may lead to. For instance while reading a book about homosexuality, some groups may touch on the subject very much while others may jump to a more religious stand point and yet others may dive into laws and government regarding such issues. The directions any conversation can go to are various and it's hard to accommodate for each one, when we as teachers never truly know which alley students may take.
Lots of activities in my fieldwork were controlled by the teacher. For instance, when doing sherades to talk about the definitions of vocabulary words, the teacher told each student how to act it out instead of allowing them to really show if they knew the word or not. Student centered would be how my teacher allowed kids to play games that centered around their reading and gave them the ability to have their own groups and keep each other on task without her being right next to them or in that group.
With the students working together they all get really excited for each other and tend to push each other more than if they were to work by themselves or even the teacher. Although the teacher did try to push the students thinking she was slightly narrow minded about what exactly to do and how to go about certain motivators. Students often times thought about new ways to remember words when working with classmates because they're all the same age and think about similar things so they were able to come up with some pretty cool little tools to remember their words that they might not have with someone older than them.
No comments:
Post a Comment