Reading #10

A reaction to: Authentic Learning for the 21st Century
By Marilyn M. Lombardi

Everywhere I look in education from state standards to administrative directives to research articles there is a clear push to higher level thinking in the classroom. I must admit that this sounds great and fits into all teachers’ dreams. In practice though this is a difficult ideal to enact, unless you want to focus social issues. I don’t want to presume to disagree with the experts but I feel that this approach is all wrong. I will also add that the approach of teaching to a multiple-choice test is also wrong.

Where we agree is on the idea that learning should be authentic. Students need to see how content is relevant to their lives whenever possible. Memorization and rot learning can have little staying power and thus little relevance.

Here is my problem. Students are not often capable of higher-level thinking. Students are defiantly into learning by doing, and experiencing. I think that the higher order goals should be secondary. A good authentic lesson will have natural inroads to higher-order-thinking and concepts but we can’t mark them as the standard, rather it must be incidental to the learning process. As students get older and are more capable of higher-order-thinking they will reach back and make those leaps, and draw those conclusions.

Technology is beautiful toward these goals. Technology is very concrete, but it does provide inroads to formative thinking. Technology provides authentic experiences to students and lets them experience and work on things that they would not normally have access to. Technology is the greatest authentic education tool in education today short of setting up apprentiships for students.