Joi Ito’s claim that “education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself” strongly resonates with me. It makes me think of the grammatical passive and active voice; I find parallels in these two ideas. In the passive voice, a noun is acted upon by an object while in active voice the subject performs the action. I liken passive voice to “education is what people do to you” and the active voice to “learning is what you do to yourself”. Actively playing a role in one’s learning or passively learning through others’ actions. It’s best to write in an active voice and it’s best to learn actively, too.
In my teaching and learning environment, I’d like to say that I do practice active learning for my students. My students are remediating a failed course through a computer program. The program pretests the student on the content before each lesson. Any part of a lesson that the student earns a 70% or above, excuses the student from completing that work. This varies from student to student and is very personalized. Students also get feedback immediately through their practice, quizzes, and tests. As the teacher, I’m here to coach them and offer assistance when students need support finding digital resources that are of help.
However, students don’t get to select which lessons they’d like to complete that may interest them more than others. They don’t really have any choice in the matter. This makes me wonder how active the program we’re using really is when students aren’t choosing what to learn in a specific course that interests/relates to them. There are probably online programs that do offer choices for students in terms of content for a given subject. I’m thinking that this would be nice for our students and allow them to be more active learners as they remediate a course.
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