Do you believe that Google can replace teachers?
For a moment you may think that Google can replace, as Google has got the tonnes of information. But when it comes to the role of a teacher in facilitating the deep learning through critical thinking, and helping a child to navigate the information with a personal and social understanding, ‘No’ Google cannot replace a teacher.
What should a teacher do if she has to be a winner in Google age?
Many of our schools are following rote learning, which is focused towards end term examination. The teachers, instead of distributing information for students to absorb and reproduce, they should help them to deeply think on the subject or topic. Because whatever information you are providing from the textbook, is already available with Google and YouTube in a polished way and the students can access the content from the 1000’s of teachers on the internet delivering the same content in different styles. Particularly the students who are explorative will not find your plain classes interesting.
As a teacher, we should help students to internalize the ‘idea’– in multiple angles. And help them approach it carefully and critically.
We are living in a society where the information is abundant and found everywhere, just that as a teacher we need to develop the thinking habits, which is more important than knowledge.
When you feel that your children do not respond to an application based question, it means that they have trouble responding, this proves that it’s not knowledge that’s the problem, but rather confidence, self-efficacy, and the thinking habits they fall back on when ‘put on the spot’ by a teacher.
The three most powerful ways to learn is Practice, Practice, and Practice. As a teacher, it is important that we give students the opportunity not just to learn information, but reflective and reflexive habits that help create a well-understood concept or a ‘New knowledge’. New knowledge refers to recently acquired or currently being acquired knowledge through observation, learning, thinking and experience (collinsdictionary). When the students get into this habit of thinking and observing, they not only become capable of thinking for themselves but tend to do so as a matter of habit.
As a teacher, we are into a great responsibility, on a daily basis we are exposing students to new ideas–or existing ideas in new ways. How we are supporting them in these cognitive disruptive events? ‘How are we teaching them to think’?
In physics, what do you mean by ‘Kinetic energy’, is available everywhere, It’s no longer information that’s available or not available, but rather its about the meaningful response to that piece of information.
To claim that the advent of Google makes knowledge–knowing–irrelevant is silly. The availability of information everywhere can’t decrease or dissolve its value. It doesn’t stop being useful or changing or compelling just because there’s a lot of it and its more accessible than at any time in human history.
To conclude in a phrase, we need to develop ‘Critical thinking’ throughout our classrooms. Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action (criticalthinking.org/).
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Meanings:
Self-efficacy refers to an individual's belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviours necessary to produce specific performance attainments.
Reflection by Maaz Mohammed A.Q