The articles this week show a focus on helping students develop the skills they need to succeed in today's world. Fullan and Langworthy (2014) explain that schools should move beyond simply teaching facts and instead help students build critical thinking skills by having them learn how to think, solve problems, work with others, and apply their knowledge to real-life situations. Kuhn (2008) agrees that students learn more when they spend time exploring important topics in depth rather than quickly covering many topics. These ideas show that learning should be active and meaningful instead of focused only on memorization. Memorization in and of itself does not help to build the critical thinking skills that our students need. In our everchanging digital landscape, it is important for students to be able to adapt to the changes in technology that are happening rapidly around them.
Another major theme in the articles is the importance of
critical thinking. Huitt (2011) discusses Bloom's Taxonomy, which helps us guide
students from basic knowledge to higher levels of thinking such as analyzing,
creating, and evaluating. Hobbs (2011) builds on this idea by explaining that
students also need digital and media literacy skills. In our current era of
quick service journalism, students are exposed to current events through
multiple different sources at rapid speed with their own biases and
shortcomings. Students need to develop those critical thinking skills explained
by Hobbs in order to determine what is true, false, and what requires further
scrutiny.
The articles also discuss how schools can successfully use
new technology and ideas. Rogers (1963) explains that people usually adopt new
innovations in stages and that some people are more willing to try new things
than others. I have seen this personally with the implementation of AI in my
school district. I myself am a late adopter of AI in my curriculum as I feel
that the use of AI in my instruction would take away from any pedagogical learning
moments that I might have myself. Others have implemented AI in earnest and have
had success with it. Fullan and Langworthy (2014) point out that technology can
improve learning when it is used to support educational goals instead of simply
adding more devices to the classroom. Use of tools like AI or the
implementation of 1-1 chromebooks is an example of this. This means schools
must carefully plan how they introduce new tools and teaching methods.
With that point, that is where I might come in as a future
school librarian. In modern media centers, the Librarian is not just the person
in charge of managing the schools collection of books, but also the schools
resource for literacy education, including media literacy. That role puts me in
a unique position to address all of the topics presented in this post. In order
to build critical thinking skills, I can support students in their research
education, showing them research methods and implementing supplemental
activities that build critical thinking skills outside of the curriculum of the
core content fields. I can also implement media literacy curriculums to build
up any gaps that students might have in their media literacy knowledge that
cannot be addressed in core classes due to the short amount of time that they
have to address the topics they need to address. Lastly, my role is situated
perfectly that I can scrutinize the use of new AI tools or technologies and
create primers and documents to support my coworkers and students in the use of
these tools in an academic setting.
Citations:
(Copied from assignment page)
Fullan, M. & Langworthy, M. (2014). A rich seam: How new pedagogies find deep learning. London: Pearson. Retrieved from https://www.pearson.com/content/dam/one-dot-com/one-dot-com/global/Files/about-pearson/innovation/open-ideas/ARichSeamEnglish.pdf
Hobbs, R. (2011). Empowering learners with digital and media literacy. Knowledge Quest, 39(5), 12-17. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.
Huitt, W. (2011). Bloom et al.'s taxonomy of the cognitive domain. Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. Retrieved from http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cognition/bloom.pdf
Kuhn, M. S. (2008). Connecting depth and balance in class. Learning & Leading with Technology, 36(1), 18-21. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.
Rogers, E. M. (1963). The adoption process II. Journal of Cooperative Extension, 1(2), 69-75. Retrieved from https://archives.joe.org/joe/1963summer/1963-2-a2.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment