Old School or New School? How About Both?
I believe that my greatest strength and my greatest weakness are one in the same - a pedagogy that is in continuous metamorphosis. I believe that it is like this because I've went from sitting in the desks of high school as a student, learning the discipline of education in post-secondary, to facilitating learning in the classroom as a educator. In that decade an educational revolution took place. Learning went from memorization to 'just Google it.' Photocopies to paperless. On site to websites. Data sheets to data plans. Overhead projectors to smartboards. Pencils to iPads. And the class enivronment to flexible environments. I am what I consider, a "Bridge" educator. a generational teacher that was lucky enough to be molded by old school and new school during my developmental stages as an educator.
It is no secret that my classroom is flexible. Social media outlets like Twitter and Instagram, a classroom website with all lesson details linked, and all students connected by Google Docs and it's sharing abiliities. Couple all of this with project-based learning (our team's most recent challenge), and I would argue that most students are learning through process and not product. I don't use new technologies for the sake of using them; anyone can bring a cart of iPads into their classroom and claim to be 21st century. We use all of these great new tools in our classroom to collaborate on inquiry-based issues; to research various perspectives to ensure that we come at the issue from all views; to model tech safe practices (especially on social media); and to become well-rounded, respectable digital citizens. It's not what can we Google with our technology. It's what can we solve with the information available.
And yet I get the feeling that students are fed up with technology. I mean let's face it, this is their norm. Technology for us is an adventure because it wasn't around in our adolescence. The Millennials have grown up in it and I sometimes forget that. It's times like these that I reach into my bag of tricks and pull out old school techniques.
My most recent success was using the bulletin boards (now referred to as vertical surfaces), for something other than a mundane display board for mug shots of past PMs. I turned it into a life-sized graph that tracked the prices of oil, gas, and loonie value over the course of 3 months. Using the surface, tacks, small stickies, and printed out dates, grade 9 social students visually participated in the crashing of the Canadian dollar and busting oil prices. We actually had students rushing to SOCIAL STUDIES to be the first to check the TSX for oil and loonie values. Students started paying attention to local gas stations as well, comparing the prices per litre around town. And then the magic happened. Students were beginning to make connections between the graph and life. The graph came to life through stories. Students listening to their parent's conversation about layoffs while eating supper and asking what the falling prices meant for Grande Prairians, their parents, and essentially, themselves. Discussion about the real estate market, public sector funding (or lack thereof), demographics, and that dreaded 'R' word; recession. The Economic Systems unit was no longer full of yawns, but excitement. All from an 'old school' solution.
So we took the information we had from our graph and then integrated the tech. Mac Books, iPads, economic websites, and Google Docs. Students found out why the prices were dropping, analyzed international relationships between oil producing countries, and essentially came to conclusion on how to solve the problem. They suggested that our Government had a responsibility to protect our oil industry by taking back control. Too many international hands control our oil development and that our Government had left the Canadian economy too susceptible to international influences. Agree or disagree, grade 9s came to this conclusion.
There are multiple places and opportunities in our classrooms to use strategies of yesterday. In fact, many of theses strategies are becoming somewhat of a novelty to our students. I argue that while creating a 21st century classroom with gidgets, gadgets, C's, and P's is currently the most effective for our students, it is not the be all of teaching. It can still be just as effective to take a step back in time and keep it simple. Students like simple. And students like relevance. I've found that old school and new school can co-exist.
