Blogging, Part Two

Alright, so I went off pretty crazy on that last blog post. This will be my continuation...

For a quick re-cap, in David Warlick's book Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century, he lists Priority of Education Questions. The current priority lists:
1. How well are students learning?
2. How should students learn?
3. What should students learn?

But! The appropriate priority should be the reverse order:
1. What should students learn?
2. How should students learn?
3. How well are students learning?

Educators are now focusing more on how well students are doing, but by doing that, they lose their focus on what they are learning. Shouldn't we focus more on the what we're teaching them, as opposed to first focusing on how well it's being done? That is what evaluation is for. Educators should evaluate how effective their teaching is afterwards. But first, we need to focus on the material.

First, I want to highlight a quote that is enlarged on a previous page in the book:
"For the first time in history, our job, as educators, is to prepare our students for a future that we cannot clearly describe."
Later on, he says, "little is being done to rethink what children need to be learning in a time of rapid change."

Yes, we are facing a time of rapid change, and it will only change more and more in future years. Now, literacy is taking on new forms. I can consider myself educationally literate, but am I contemporarily literate? Am I fully literate in terms of a digital, global world? I'm on my way towards becoming more literate, but we need to keep this new literacy in mind as we enter the classroom.

Students need to become as contemporarily literate as possible. Everything now is digital, or done online somehow. Technology keeps going further and further, thus, our classrooms need to do the same. We have to prepare students for this changing future. We have to keep up with the times, because now we have more equipment than just chalk and erasers.

There are many important questions facing ELA educators, but I think WHAT the students are learning seems to be the most relevant answer. Course content is what a class will focus on. This is the material that students will take out of the classroom. First, the material is important, because from there you branch off onto how they should learn that material, and then how well they learned it. These are steps in a process. The kernel comes from what they are actually learning.

What students are learning can mesh into how they are learning it. If we teach them how to be more contemporarily literate, then we can expose them to online sources and technologically advanced learning tools. The"what" can help us move towards the "how." Then, we can assess their learning through how they produce what they have learned.

Moving into a new time, we need to focus first on what students are learning before we should focus on how and how well.