Importance of teachers learning alongside students

I came across an article by Seymour Papert: Project-Based Learning on www.edutopia.org .

In this article, Papert mentions ‘the importance of teachers learning alongside students’

“What we need is kinds of activity in the classroom where the teacher is learning at the same time as the students and with the students. Unless you do that, you’ll never get out of the bind of what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do when they went to school.” (Papert, 2001)

The times have changed. What/how we learned in school is not always applicable in today’s or tomorrows world.

Teachers have to be learning at the same time as the student. The only constant in life is change and therefore knowledge is does not stay stagnant . It moves forward and changes depending upon it’s context. Therefore, teachers have to be life long learners and keep learning.

Papert brings up the example of the well known robot wars that many engineering and science students participate in. Every robot is unique and therefore every situation/problem is unique. It’s never been there before. And that’s very different from the classroom situation where we teach static material. “We’ve been there before. The teacher is not learning anything because the teacher knows that already. And this is a very bad situation for learning.” (Papert, 2001)

“Again, one of my favorite little analogies: If I wanted to become a better carpenter, I’d go find a good carpenter, and I’ll work with this carpenter on doing carpentry or making things. And that’s how I’ll get to be a better carpenter. So if I want to be a better learner, I’ll go find somebody who’s a good learner and with this person do some learning.” (Papert, 2001)

Same would be true for graduate students. If the student wanted to be a better researcher then he/she would seek out a researcher.

As Sir Ken Robinson mentions in his TED talk, Changing education paradigms. “We are trying to meet the future by doing what we did  the past” We stayed in school because we were told that if you got educated you could get a job. The more education the higher the pay. This is not always a reality today and the students know it. “you are better having a degree but it is not a guarantee anymore”

My job, my passion did not exist when I was in school.  The path I took to get were I am today was unique and I did not have a map. This is the reality of many people and of our students. We don’t know what lies ahead. I believe we need to teach the students to be life-long learners, creative thinkers and problem-solvers or as Sir Ken Robinson calls it “Divergent Thinkers”. We must model that behavior and become learners ourselves excepting the fact that there is more than one correct answer and more than one way of doing things.

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