Avatar conveyed several messages, some of which have been interpreted as offensive. However, I received one positive key educational message:
All teachers on this planet should probably gather intel on their Net Geners and leverage that intel in their teaching strategies, maybe even teach them English. Teachers can be temporarily transported into the rich, diverse, techy world of their students.
Here are 3 steps to consider in this process:
1. Understand your students: You need to thoroughly understand them and their culture, behaviors, habits, and latest technologies, even iPad, should it take off. To ignore your students’ culture, mindset, and world is unwise. You should really get to know your students one-on-one and as a group. Collect “intel” on their interests, intelligence strengths, learning styles, and the way they think and behave.
2. Leverage their characteristics, behaviors, and habits: Use your “intel” of their characteristics to design and custom tailor your teaching strategies for them. Consider each characteristic and how one or more teaching techniques can draw on their specific interests, intelligences, and learning styles. You should be sensitive to their individual strengths and weaknesses and try to build on the former before helping them to compensate for the latter. Your strategies should involve a one-size-fits-one approach.
3. Teach new content with different strategies: The connections between you and your students and their characteristics and your teaching strategies create a foundation of trust and credibility. Now you can add new content and other strategies to your teaching. Experiment with the latest technologies. Your students are now on board and will eagerly assist you on that journey. Solicit their input. Involve them in decisions in your learner-centered environment.
With or without Avatar, these steps can improve your teaching of this bright-eyed-and–bushy-tailed group of frisky Net Geners you see almost every day. The extraordinary experience of Avatar just punctuated the importance of these thoughts.
For further intel on teaching strategies matched to Net Gener learner characteristics, checkout Articles 2008a and 2009a on my Web under Publications (see link in margin to right).
As always, let me know your thoughts, especially if you are an Avatar fan. Have a fantastic teaching experience this spring!
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
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