A new generation requires a new way of teaching, thinking, and learning. It is readily apparent when you walk down the streets and see kids nonchalantly changing music on their Ipods while simultaneously texting their friends and rapidly readjusting to look up the nearest ice cream place on their Iphone. The world has fundamentally changed, and thus so has the way we educate students. The Old Model of education—absorption and repetition—must make way for the modern student. Today’s student is a product of their environment—fast paced, full of questions, and looking to discover on their own—all of which comes from having the world at their fingertips. As Seymour Papert, an expert on using technology to impact education, once said, “The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive the child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.”
The mass production economy and it’s one size fits all absorption techniques has evolved into the Net Generation. Thus, our teaching methods must evolve accordingly, away from lecture and note-taking and some of the traditional styles of teaching and towards inquiry based learning, collaboration and experiential learning. Broadcast learning of old was teacher centered, molding to the teacher’s own flair and style. It was an inflexible and one-size-fits-all method that utilized individualistic learning. Today’s Net Generation—as a result of the many stimuli and prevalence of technology—must become much more learner centered, discovery based, one-size-fits-one, and collaborative. The teacher must follow an interactive model to grasp and hold the learners’ attention and must present them with real world applications and issues that they must synthesize, analyze, and respond to.
Nearly half who dropped out of high school have found school uninteresting or boring, and 70% of these dropouts felt unmotivated or found the material irrelevant. Part of this stems from the fact that teachers are no longer endless supplies of knowledge, circumvented entirely by the internet. If students want an answer, it is a quick search away on the Internet, an endless fountain of knowledge. This accessibility must be brought into the classroom. In a wiki generation, teachers must be able to enter the classroom with malleable plans, and be able to go off on a tangent if it creates discussion and fosters a lifelong love of learning or interest in the subject matter. Lecturing must be replaced with questioning and the Socratic method. Questions must not only be encouraged, but attempted to be answered, either by you as the classroom guru, or as a cooperative effort by the class. Students are eager to hypothesize probable answers, reasons, or explanations, and have the ability to test their responses on the Internet.
The Net Generation has been characterized by some as an entire generation suffering from attention deficit disorder. Up tempo, shifting gears, and focusing on several different things at once has been the gift and curse of this generation. It has enabled people born during the rise of the Internet to be able to process faster, compartmentalize, have an average IQ over three points higher than the previous generation, and multi-task like it’s our birthright. With these developed abilities, comes the necessity to nurture these skills and cater to what has become the Net Generation’s nature. The Internet and technology have changed our lives in every aspect; marketing, producing, consuming, how we work, read, learn, and relax, and it will continue to do so. Teachers must be prepared to adapt to this generation so that the classroom has become an extension of their lives.
How can we do this in low income communities? In the face of deflating budgets and countless other school needs, more resources and means for interactive learning must be brought into the classroom. Anthony Marx, president of Amherst College, laid out this issue, “The funding of our K-12 schools is by design regressive. We base it on property taxes. Schools nearest the wealthy get far more resources than those in poorer neighborhoods, which instead often need more, not less, to bring their students up to speed. In America today we spend six times as much per student in the best funded schools as in the least. This is an astonishing indictment and a violation of American ideals.” Technology must be added incrementally, lessons must be crafted with student interests in mind, and teachers must go in with a breadth of knowledge on the subject to invoke enthusiasm and passion. Students are naturally galvanized by some of these random, yet applicable facts that can be found on the Wikipedia pages. It does not take much to do some research ahead of time, for instance the textbook may say Ramses the II was the “King of Kings” for all of his accomplishments. However, it does not hurt being able to add that “by the way, he also had more than 100 sons.” A quick comment like that made my students double take, snap awake, and start firing questions. You may not be able to answer them like the Internet, but it provides you with fresh ground for discussion, collaboration, self-discovery, and a conversation that could extend far beyond the classroom.
–Evan Piekara
