Refreshing Honesty about Who Controls Knowledge
During a focus group this week, a very experienced teacher said, "I don't know how to teach when I can't control the knowledge. Students can find way more information in seconds online that I will ever know in my lifetime. That scares me." Wow! Rarely are our focus group participants so refreshingly honest. I suspect that this teacher has lots of company, but very, very few will admit thinking the same way.
Most of us over a certain age (40? 50?), and that is a vast number of teachers, went to school during a time when knowledge was both scarce and controllable. Teachers had it and students did not. Today's education space is one of abundance, so much so that it is like drinking from a firehose to consume all the available information. That fact, more than anything else, is the real game-changer in this field. Most other changes, from pedagogy to the physical layout of classrooms, stems from the shifting knowledge paradigm.