What Should Students Expect?
While writing in Education Week, Katie Hanifin, a high school teacher in Oneida, New York, explains the basic needs — the new needs, that is — of students in today’s classroom. From her perspective, students today are different learners and need to be treated as such. As digital natives, they tend to grasp information in a way that requires higher speed access, dynamic options, and less context than a map toward the answers. Writing from a student’s perspective, Hanifin continues:
We don’t always require introductions followed by backgrounds, followed by histories. Give us the content and feel free to leave us something to figure out on our own. Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, we can research independently—we’re actually quite good at it. Give us something about which to be curious.