Chapter 4 Reflection

Chapter 4: Emerging Roles Within the Knowledge Community

            This chapter begins by discussing the role that many teachers are thrown into due to the fast changing times of bigger and better technologies.  Many teachers are “digital immigrants” when it comes to technology which causes many to steer away from using it in their classrooms.  However, teachers do not realize how they can use their students to help them learn technology skills and best practices.  For example, giving up control and letting students “teach” you is a very hard thing to do. 

            To help aid in this problem of stepping off of the edge and using technology, the book discusses several areas of support for teachers.  Collaboration with peers, it discusses, is one of the best ways for teachers to learn new skills and adapt to innovations.  Another example was asking another teacher to grade and give feedback on student work can help students see from another perspective their strengths and weaknesses.  Teachers can also gain knowledge experience from other professions and how they handle growth. 

            The second half of the chapter deals with shifting control of the classroom from the teacher to the students.  Students applying skills learned to solve real world problems, with the teachers facilitating this work, mainly accomplish this idea of student-centered teaching.  Several examples are given; but one in particular discusses a girl whose level of school interest was very low before given a project to allow her to relate an assignment to her life experiences with disabled persons.  When she did this she ended up building a complete network of recreational service for handicapped people in her town.  This example shows, that for a student to see value in a given way of learning, they must be able to apply it to their own lives. 

            Some of the situations described in this chapter I have seen first hand.  My first couple years of teacher, students had access to technology, however, it is nothing compared to what they have access to today.  Naturally I was a little apprehensive at first (which the chapter discusses as well), but I learned to embrace the fact that students live and sleep with the technology that they possess and if I truly wanted to reach them I would have to find a way to use it for good.  In order to do this I had to open up to my colleagues and ask for help, which up until the last year I was apprehensive to do, because like any teacher I had my own “tricks” and I didn’t want anyone to steal my “tricks.”  I quickly learned that this could not be my mentality anymore, integrating technology effectively into the classroom is just to big of a job.  This is when I and another teacher really started to take a good long hard look about the way students were learning in our classrooms. 

            We asked ourselves one question: “What is the best use of our class time?”  We came to the conclusion that it was not lecturing and assigning homework after it.  We decided to make our class time more valuable and make our classes more relatable to our student’s lives.  However, this is easier said than done and it is something that we are really working hard to get up and running.  This chapter along with discussions from other “flip” teachers and teachers at our school have provided us with a number of new strategies to help relate material to today’s students.