In his call to action, Richardson shares 6 ideas that promote "learning/ relearning." I would love to promote, in my classroom, the second ideal: "discover, don't deliver, the curriculum." I find this notion fascinating, because it re-purposes the role of the teacher in the classroom. Traditional classroom settings that I grew up in were ones in which teachers delivered information on specific content area, and I was to retain the information and then be assessed. Teaching to allow kids to "discover" means moving beyond the traditions of this classroom framework. The focus then becomes no longer on the teacher's ability to "develop lesson plans" and show "what they know," and instead redirects the teacher's roles to "inspire students to pursue their own interests in the content of that subject matter." Richardson illustrates the importance in the teacher's ability to ask the student questions, and use insight to manage the students' varying choices regarding their paths of learning.
These new roles as an educator that Richardson illustrates create obstacles and are far from an easy task to fulfill. With this new model of the teacher as the promoter-of-discovery, educators must push their students to pursue projects that connect their own interests to that of the school required curriculum. I see potential difficulty in getting students not only interested in the materials presented to them, but also inspiring students dig deeper with in the content are to discover more. We as educators will need to do a lot of motivating for our students. Applying this model to my experiences with my students, it raises many questions. How do we as teachers engage our students to be interested in the content we present. Not only that, but interested so much so that they are eager and excited to explore or "discover" and create their own new learning paths within that content area that we teach. My content area, being English, I think of those students who are reluctant to learn the English subject, or as I often hear, claim to "hate reading/hate writing." Richardson's second model "discover, don't deliver, the curriculum" thus excites me to experiment with how I can engage and excite my students in the classroom and teach them to be discoverers within the English content. I am eager just the same to become a discoverer myself as I navigate through this process of "learning, unlearaning, and relearning."
Richardson, Will. Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere. TED Conferences, 2012. EPUB file.