C4T Comment's for Teachers

For the past week I have been following Beth Knittle's blog posts. Her first post was Learning is not an Instructional Method. In summary, this post says that all students do not learn in the same way. Learning is something that the student does individually on their own. It is up to the teacher to form the way they teach around the class as a whole or to a specific student who might need to be taught in a different manner in order to help the students learn. I agreed with everything Ms. Knittle said. She also mentioned in her blog about some people thinking that online classes are to boost grades. I think that taking online classes are just another example of the way certain students learn. For some students, they like to teach themselves. Therefore, online classes are a much better suit for them. For other students they need to be shown and directed in what they are learning. That results in them needing to be in an actual classroom. Online classes are not just a "grade booster" but an actual preference on the way students learn.
Beth's second post that I read was Thoughts on Beware the Straight A Student. In this post, Beth talked about how she once took a class where the teacher did not allow for creativity. The teacher would assign certain work, and give out resources to complete the work, but would not allow the students to explore other resources. Beth mentioned that she did not learn anything in this class. I think that if we limit our students creativity to just what we know then the student isn't actually learning anything more than what we give them. If the student wants to find out their own information, this is a wonderful thing. We should be thrilled that they are interested in learning and support this in every way possible.