Hopefully, you’re wondering about my title. I don’t mean to say edcamp is a bad conference, although it is a bit too tech-focused for me. I mean to say what I see happening at this conference, conversations about teaching & learning, should be happening daily in schools.
The session facilitators here are not acting as “experts”, the participants aren’t trying to give “right answers. What I see here is what classrooms & faculty meetings should be like.
Teaching as Dynamic 
Hello again Mr. Kruse! I’ve commented before on your blog post “Pseudoteaching with Demos.” Edcamp sounds like an interesting event to attend. My sister is about to graduate and she is currently doing her student-teaching. She recently attended a very large conference, and explained that the whole experience was dreary, dragged-out, rigid and seemingly unnecessary. Edcamp sounds like the complete opposite! I’d really enjoy hearing more about it.
Matthew Poirier
LikeLike
Sorry…just wanted to talk about your tweet…I have been trying not to just re-tweet great thoughts, but after my exhausted babble below, maybe I should have ;)
“If you do not understand process that produced content, to what extent do you understand content?”
I just had a conversation about this today, same idea, different words. I am wondering if it can be pushed a step further…if you don’t create content, you can’t understand the process and the content. If you teach writing you must write. If you teach history, you must produce original research based content. Which then goes to maybe there should be no “teaching” but only guiding students through the process–not inquiry, but discovery(is that another tweet of yours from tonight?). Not a fan of the current style of inquiry being taught which is essentially closed minded find the facts that back up your predetermined opinion.
I don’t know how it looks in each subject, or if it is easier in one vs the other. Have been thinking about this a lot during my current unit. It was probably the most teacher heavy unit I have done in about 5 years. But what I realized at the end is that the sources and the order they were presented in did not require “teaching,” but instead accidentally led the kids through “the process” because of the order and info in each. I have “taught” the process, but it was taught, not internalized. Somehow in this unit because of how each was presented they internalized the process and automatically processed each source as a historian would as we progressed through the unit–at one point I put up an image and they went directly to who the artist was and why it was painted a certain way before going to what they saw. Ahh…think I lost my point…going to bed.
LikeLike