I would like to firstly welcome all our new families to the IFS community and welcome back all our families from last year. I speak for all the teachers when I say, we have been very busy over the past month or so preparing some amazing projects for this year that I’m sure our students will enjoy.
I wanted to share the following clip that Laura showed the teachers during our week of professional development. It opened up some lively discussion allowing many different interpretations of how it is relevant to teaching at IFS.
Here are my thoughts…
Although extremely funny and somewhat unrealistic, a similar situation is often seen the classroom. Many students are conditioned to a style of teaching where the teacher is ‘the provider of all knowledge’ giving students all the information and answers they need – an act often referred to as “spoon feeding”. In this case, students raise their hand, ask what the answer is and they are given it. This approach can cause students to lose the ability to, not only think for themselves, but think critically about the information provided. It can also get students into a habit of expecting the teacher to provide them with all the answers and to help them complete set tasks – something which we all know doesn’t happen in the real world.
By now you know that at IFS we have a different approach to teaching – Project Based Learning or PBL. PBL requires students to take responsibility for their learning and find the answers themselves. In other words, we teach in a way where our students learn how to take the steps up the broken elevator, rather than letting them stand screaming for help, with an expectation that someone else will do it for them.
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