Teachers as guides and facilitators (was Joan's thought)

[Marielle Lange]

>> In these times, there is an emphasis for teachers
>> being guides in the adventure of getting knowledge.


Can I bring to your attention that these ideas are very popular in  
the wiki for learning literature. I read an interesting paper about  
it:  <http://coco.edfac.usyd.edu.au/Reports/Nystrom.html>

Annoyingly, the link is now broken so I added my notes on this paper:

The role of facilitator and guides tend to be difficult to assume in  
a traditional setting. In constrat, the infrastructure provided by a  
wiki-web makes it easier for the teacher to relinquish control (to  
some extent) to influence and encourage rather than control and enforce.

In a constructivist setting, the teacher role is at least five-fold,  
on top of being experts in their field:

Scenarist: The teacher"s distinctive role is to create the kind of  
rich environment within which active learning can emerge from the  
interactions of all participants.

Facilitators: to function as a node for sharing information among our  
students, so that they are aware of such possibilities;

Coach & Shepherd: The teacher has the additional task of encouraging,  
facilitating and nudging a process of emergence, of helping to assure  
that it evolves in directions that are engaging and productive for  
all. This consists of observing students while they carry out a task  
and offering hints, feedback, modeling, reminders, etc.

Synthesizer and reflector: The teacher has the responsibility to  
summarize and abstract the variety of insights students bring to  
their work, so that all can build out again from that reduction. He  
is the the one who has primary responsibility for making classroom  
activities visible and meaningful to all participants.This involves  
getting students to articulate their knowledge, reasoning, or problem- 
solving processes, encouraging reflection and comparison of their own  
problem-solving processes with those of an expert or another student.  
This demands astute editing and feedback by teachers (see, for  
instance, the work of Eleanor Duckworth and others).

Sometimes just plain getting out of the way to let students discover  
things for themselves and to help them enhance their abilities to  
think independently. Forcing students to do exploration is critical,  
if they are to learn how to frame questions or problems that are  
interesting and that they can solve (Collins, Brown, Newman, 1989,  
481-482).


Now, any idea of how to use revolution to support such an approach?

Marielle