At teachers we are commonly told that our job is to "teach" others. This implies that we have knowledge that we are inputing into our students. We give they receive. Is this really how learning takes place though? Is it a teachers job to give students knowledge, and "teach" them or is this a misconception of what is actually taking place in the relationship between teacher and student.

In my opinion, the teachers job is to guide the student to the knowledge that is already present. We do not give them knowledge, we lead them to "self-actualization" of learning. For there really is no learning except self-learning. A teacher must understand that a students learning abilities come from within them and are not given by the teacher. To summarize, we are not "teachers" but rather "guides". What yall think. More later.

I have never really thought of teaching in this sort of way before but it does make sense. Because there is no way that each teacher could be passionate and knowledgeable in every subject matter. Rather we take what we read and present the information to our class. It is their jobs as students to do something with the information provided. They can learn it or they can just memorize it.

What you are saying would also account for the various skill levels in a given classroom. Some students will work toward the information provided and learn more, because that is their curious and intuative nature. Other, on the other hand will not go any further than what is presented to them in class. As teachers we wont be able to provide them with everything, some things they will have to learn on their own.

I agree that is is the teacher's job to guide the students to information to be learned. I think this also gets into gray areas about teaching. The students ability and interest to learn also is a huge factor as to whether or not they will learn or memorize, or do nothing.

To expound on the idea of the teacher as a guide, the way in which a teacher chooses to guide his or her students is important. Depending on the number of students it can be challenging to engage all of the students in the same way. Some of the discussion questions we talked about in class the other week are perhaps a good way to do so. I think another idea is appealing to student's interest in other areas. Finding areas of interest unique to each student and making connections between those interests and the course content. For instance, make connections between fishing and math, running and science, dancing and english, etc. In this way, students may become interested in something they wouldn't otherwise if it can be related to something they do like. It's a far greater responsible to guide students to learn versus to teach them to memorize.

I do think that we are to guide students to what they already know, but I also think some of it depends on the grade you are teaching. If you are teaching in Kindergarten, some students may come in to the classroom with hardly any knowledge at all on specific things. (For example: My cousin who is a kindergarten teacher once had a student who had never held a pencil.) In this case, it is important that the teacher simply teaches them some basic knowledge before he/she can move on to being a guide. In the upper grades, there is more of a chance that a student can be led to pull out their own knowledge if helped by a teacher. I think that you need to have/teach both aspects to be able to help children learn.

I also agree that teaching is not comprised completely on imparting new knowledge to our students. I do think thought that it is more of a mixture of guiding them to explore new knowledge as well as exploring deeper the knowledge they already have. It seems that the way our schools are set up each year builds off of knowledge learned the prior year. Even in the younger grades such as Kindergarten, teachers use information the students already know to help them learn. Students may not know their letters or how to write but they know simple things like we are people, inside vs. outside, the difference between day and night, etc. Teachers use these types of pre-existing knowledge to guide students to learn things like what the moon and sun are, types of weather outside, how to relate a name to a person or recognize their own name, etc. It seems that teaching is about making connections for your students. I mean this in the learning sense rather than the interpersonal manner. We are to help our students learn to make connections between this new found information and information they already know so that the learning becomes meaningful and useful rather than just newly imparted knowledge that doesn't matter because it doesn't exist in the real world.