Go and read The Emotional Side of Self Learning over at Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed. It’s a great post about how our students cope with the information they gather as self learners online. Will links to Rob Mancabelli at Educational Thinking who says,
At my session on the Changing Role of the Teacher, one of the participants made a remark that I thought a lot about last night. She’s a principal and trained psychologist who has worked with adolescents in private practice for many years. We were chatting about the growing importance of media literacy, i.e. how we can teach our kids to sift through and evaluate the mountain of internet-accessible information. In the middle of this discussion, she wondered aloud about how we can help students deal with the emotional component of having access to all of this information.
But when I asked her to elaborate, her concern was that students were seeking out and locating more and more emotionally packed information on their own time, often by themselves, causing them to come to our schools each day laden with a plethora of undiscussed feelings, questions and ideas.
Well, I’m not a psychologist by any means, but the kids I know aren’t exactly walking around in isolation without anyone to talk to–they have huge support systems among their peers which are often much more important to them than we are. Our kids are also connected to the adults in our building (a benefit of a small school) and in many cases, they’re connected to families at home. So this idea that kids in general have undiscussed feelings about emotionally packed information is escaping me. Our kids talk most things to death, either on-line or in our schools, or when they’re hanging out. They have more of a voice now than ever before. As a teenager, I certainly read novels that were thought provoking and emotionally charged. Unless a friend had read the same book, the discussion part of it probably didn’t happen. But now, our kids talk to each other, online, constantly. They can send someone to the link of what they’ve read immediately. And they are happy to lead a teacher down a discussion path in the classroom if it’s even remotely connected to the instruction.
If our students are walking around with undiscussed feelings, questions and ideas, I’d guess they weren’t all that ignited by what they saw and read on-line. The point is that with most students little is left undiscussed. However, if students are walking around with feelings, questions and ideas based on what they’re reading and seeing online, I say they call that curiosity and that’s the point. I’m happy when they’re curious about anything and directing their own learning is a dream. The opposite is too often the case where our students don’t want to think, they just want us to tell them what to do. I want thinkers and learners to walk out the door of G-Town. Teachers first.