Needs of the Classroom

 

Starting my career in middle school, I felt under pressure to be able to check off all the boxes of the prescribed learning to help my students because of the theory-based agendas that we had learned in University. “If they can learn everything in this book, they would be set to move forward” was an underlying feeling that I had. After settling into the job for a while and learning from trial by fire and from experienced teachers, my views and focus changed, along with my praxis.

 

When I moved into an elementary setting, I realized the necessity of tailoring learning to the classroom needs. Sometimes ticking off all the boxes for prescribed learning worked, while other times slowing it down and focusing on specific content is essential. The new curriculum in British Columbia allows us as teachers to cover the concepts in ways that fit the needs of our classrooms. It allows teachers to find breadth in the content areas and just not on the surface.

 

In this short paper, I want to connect how the classroom culture allows the collective knowledge of the group to grow and how that can impact the future student.

 

Collective Knowledge

 

Your students’ understanding of a topic can be formed by the collective knowledge that the class possesses. Each of the individual students have varying levels of knowledge on a topic and can share their ideas and allow other students to scaffold onto each other’s knowledge. This brings in the importance of the individual student’s voice and willingness to share. This has often made me think about what provides students with the optimal environment to share their thoughts and ideas?

 

In my view, a main pillar of how students learn is the underlying importance of a positive classroom culture. Personally, I think it is the backbone of a classroom’s potential, especially in an elementary setting. Each classroom is its own tiny community and teachers need to constantly be assessing the needs of that community. As a teacher, it is essential to have a safe and open environment where students can feel that their views and opinions matter and will be heard. Not only does this allow students to take risks but it also provides the optimal environment for the classroom’s collective knowledge to grow.

 

The article, Teaching As if Children Matter, Kritt stresses the importance of a positive classroom culture and how it can enable students to take more risks in their own learning and it can encourage deeper thinking as a group. (Kritt, 2018) In the article, the author investigates educational reforms in the United States and how they steered away from the importance of having the students as the forefront and increasingly focused on test scores and sources of funding. Similarly to the David Blades article, the “expert” voices tend to be imperious and forget that students need to be part of the conversation concerning their learning. (Blades, 1997)

 

Taken on a smaller scale by looking into an individual classroom, teachers must remember that if there was no student voice and students’ perspectives were not taken into consideration, school would be nothing more then rote learning. There would be no discussions, viewpoints or depth of learning. I think that as educators of the next generation we have to keep that small-scale example in the forefront of our minds and constantly be checking-in with it and making sure that what we see through that lens informs our priorities in teaching.

 

The Future Student

 

Education is a vital instrument in changing culture. Social forces impact culture and therefore needs to play an integral role in education, specifically educators should be helping their classes to understand the constantly changing landscape of society. This allows students to gain understanding, awareness and learn compassion that can lead to inquiry about contemporary issues and allow the students to gain their own point of view on topics.

 

Looking towards the future, it will be essential for educators to look at how technology is becoming a dominant force in the world. As educators it is vital for us to prepare our students for the growth of technology in our everyday lives and the job market. By doing this, we can teach transferable skills that students can use to become skilled workers in the workforce. Goodson supports my point of view in his article, Towards a s Social Constructionist Perspective, which stresses that the curriculum has to move towards “embracing the practical terrain” (Goodson, 1990). Failing to recognize the need for students to gain basic digital literacy at a young age is like expecting a child to ace a complex math exam with an abacus. Sure, it could work but there are better tools for the job.

 

For me in my elementary classroom, this means providing the students with the toolbox of digital literacies and skills to build on. Moving into middle and high school work, technology use will only grow and expand. If they do not possess the basic digital literacy skills before heading into these technology saturated environments, they will already have fallen behind. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, their realities are filled with daily interactions with technology such as video games, social media, cell phones and many more, which allows them to hopefully build on the basic digital literacies that they already possess.

 

Past Creates the Future

 

It is important to look towards the future when educating students, but I also believe that it is vital to look at their past to inform their present. BC’s curriculum has allowed for students to explore their identities and their local regions through historical context to build their understanding and to create informed knowledge about the present.

 

I believe the need for local and regional historical contexts to build knowledge is integral for developing the identity of an individual and a classroom culture. According to Goodwin, the past is vital and allows us to construct and reconstruct the present reality instead of just accepting the context from a singular focus (Goodson, 1990) . He argues that by understanding the past we can inform what we value as important in the future.

 

Overall, the process of educating students is entangled in countless opinions, styles, policies, methods and practices. As a result, it is challenging to boil down into a perfect potion. It is a messy, complex and creative framework while simultaneously being rule-bound, political and rigid. It is a complicated task but what unites us all is that we are just doing our best to help the students.

Featured Image: Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

 

References

Blades, D. (1997). Procedures of Power in a Curriculum Discourse: Conversations from Home. JCT.

Goodson, I. F. (1990). TOWARDS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST PERSPECTIVE. 299–312.

Kritt, D. W. (2018). Teaching As if Children Matter. In D. W. Kritt (Ed.), Constructivist Education in an Age of Accountability (pp. 3–19). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66050-9_1