Discussion+Materials

David Warlick's Blog (From 2 Cents' Worth - October 8, 2010) //Out of that conversation came a goodly and completely predictable amount of push back. It was along the lines of, “I agree with everything that David is saying, and believe that this is where we need to be, but…” The buts were the regular barriers to retooling, including, but not limited to **government testing**, **government testing**, and **government testing**. But another area of concern that surfaced more than once was a reluctance to trust their students to take advantage of the tools and opportunities for learning that I was suggesting and demonstrating. There was a belief that their students are lazy and will only use these empowerments for shortcuts.// I’ve been noodling over this, trying to figure out the nature of this reluctance that the teachers and principals were referring to and the nature of their perceptions. Equally important is coming up with a language to describe the problem. What surfaced in my own thinking was that educators continue to think of their charges as //students//, rather than thinking of them as //learners//. I spend a lot of time, these days, talking and writing about how we are asking teachers to redefine what it means to be a teacher — and, in all fairness, how difficult that is. I try to present myself as a master learner, suggesting that part of what teachers should be, today, is constant and resourceful learners — **master learners**. But perhaps a significant part of this exercise in redefinition should involve our students — an explicit remolding of perceptions of these youngsters, in order to fully shift the relationship between student and teacher, learner and master learner. So let me see if I can distinguish between these notions of //students// and //learners//. //One of the problems that I struggled with, as I was writing and ordering these qualities was that I wanted to put assessment, for the// student//, at the top of the list — and assessment, for the// learner//, at the bottom. For the student, assessment is king, in very much the same way that quality control is such a critical part of the manufacturing processes. But assessment, for learners, is much less obvious, and at the same time, it is much more integral to the learning. Assessment for classrooms of learners is the enormous amounts of qualitative data that is collected by the teacher (and other students) on a minute-by-minute bases.// Assessment is also, and this is what I find most interesting, not a “right” or a “wrong” — a check (?) or an X. It is a simple self-asked question, “Did that work?”
 * || **Students** || **Learners** ||
 * **Relationship with educators** || Students are employees, required to obediently follow instructions. || Learners are citizens with a vested interest in the learning society. ||
 * **Relationship with other “Students”** || Students are competitors || Learners are collaborators ||
 * **Motivation** || Obligation: Students are culturally obliged to work for the teacher & for compensation //(below)// || Responsibility: Learners are motivated by an understood and realized “value” in their work, especially when it is valuable to others. ||
 * **Compensation** || Institution defined grades and gateways to college (another institution) and a good job (another institution) || A sense of ongoing accomplishment that is not delivered but earned, and not symbolic but tangible and valuable — an investment. ||
 * **Mode of Operation** || Compliant, group-disciplined, objective-oriented, and trainable || Persevering, self-disciplined, group- and goal-oriented, resourceful, and**learning in order to achieve**rather than **achieving learning**. ||
 * **Why?** || Compelled || Curious ||
 * **Equipped** || ..with packaged knowledge and tools for recording packaged knowledge — prescribed and paced learning || ..with tools for exploring a networked variety of content, experimenting with that content, and discovering, concluding, and constructing knowledge — invented learning ||
 * **Assessment** || Measuring what the student has learned. || Measuring what the learner can do with what has been learned. ||