I Bet This Sounds Weird...

Do you want your children to be dependent learners? I mean dependent on a teacher to learn?

In some readings I am doing, Barrows shares some teaching approaches that make students dependent on teachers in medical learning situations.

Making Students Dependent on Teachers

1. Directive Teachers, 2. Providing teacher driven learning expectations, 3. By pairing reading assignments with problems, 4. Telling students what they should know, 5. Faculty generated multiple choice questions to assess.

Imagine being treated by a doctor who did really well on multiple choice questions but still needs to turn to the teacher when presented with your health problem?

Maybe that is how Obama is going to come up with Doctors to serve his ficticious 50 Million people who he says don't have insurance?

Call your teacher during the operation because you came up against something you hadn't seen before?

Medical knowledge on demand for surgeons. Of course this won't work. The point is that medical institutions have changed the way they teach medicine to encourage students to inquire themselves, free inquiry actually, and learn what models, frameworks and patterns of diagnosing work as they gather, sift through and conclude from information surrounding a patients presenting problems, as their learning model.

Why do we think our kids deserve any less for their lives. Do we want them to be less capable than the best doctor? Less capable at all? Yet we often continue using the same dependance creating methods with our own children.

It worked for me, right?