Pangasinan State University

School of Advanced Studies

Urdaneta City

Science, Technology, and the Future:

New Mentalities, New Practices
The old paradigm of teaching is based on John Locke's assumption that the untrained student mind is like a blank
sheet of paper waiting for the instructor to write on it. Lecturing while requiring students to be passive, silent,
isolated, and in competition with each other seems the only way to teach. The old paradigm is carried forward by
sheer momentum, while almost everyone persists in the hollow pretence that all is well. But all is not well.

 Transferring knowledge from teacher to student. The teacher's job is to give it; the student's job is to get it.
Teachers transmit information that students are expected to memorize and then recall.

 Filling passive, empty vessels with knowledge. Students are passive recipients of knowledge. Teachers own the
knowledge that students memorize and recall.

 Classifying students by deciding who gets which grade and sorting students into categories by deciding who does
and doesn't meet the requirements to be graduated, go on to college, and get a good job.

 Conducting education within a context of impersonal relationships among students and between teachers and
students. Based on the Taylor model of industrial organizations, students and teachers are perceived to be
interchangeable and replaceable parts in the “education machine.”

 Maintaining a competitive organizational structure in which students work to outperform their classmates and
teachers work to outperform their colleagues.

 Assuming that anyone with expertise in a field can teach. This is sometimes known as the content premise—if
you have a Ph.D. in the field, you can teach regardless of whether or not you have any pedagogical training.

Teaching is changing. The old paradigm is being dropped for a new paradigm based on theory and research with
clear applications to instruction. Educators must now think of teaching in terms of several different principal
activities.

 The teacher's role in this activity is to create the conditions within which students can construct meaning from
new material studied by processing it through existing cognitive structures and then retaining it in long-term
memory where it remains open to further processing and possible reconstruction.

 Students construct, discover, transform, and extend their own knowledge. Learning is something a learner
does, not something that is done to a learner. Students do not passively accept knowledge from the teacher or
curriculum. They use new information to activate their existing cognitive structures or construct new ones.

 Teachers' efforts are aimed at developing students' competencies and talents. Student effort should be
inspired and secondary schools must “add value” by cultivating talent. A “cultivate and develop” philosophy must
replace the “select and weed out” philosophy. Students' competencies and talents must be developed under the
assumption that with effort and education, any student can improve.

References:

Discussant: Sheena M. Racuya

 Pangasinan State University
School of Advanced Studies
Urdaneta City

 Teachers and students work together, making education a personal transaction. All education is a social
process that can occur only through interpersonal interaction (real or implied). There is a general rule of instruction:
The more pressure placed on students to achieve and the more difficult the material to be learned, the more
important it is to provide social support within the learning situation.

 Cooperative learning provides the means of operationalizing the new paradigm of teaching and provides
the context that encourages the development of student talent. It's an important part of changing the passive
and impersonal character of many classrooms. It ensures that students are cognitively, physically, emotionally, and
psychologically involved in constructing their own knowledge and succeeding in school and life.

 Challenge and social support must be balanced if students are to cope successfully with the stress inherent
in learning situations. Learning results when individuals cooperate to construct shared understandings and
knowledge. Teachers must be able to build positive relationships with students and create the conditions within
which students build caring and committed relationships with each other. The school then becomes a learning
community of committed scholars in the truest sense.

Teaching in the present day scenario is no mean feat! It is both a challenge and an opportunity. It is
challenging to engage a generation hooked to technology in meaningful conversation about what matters
in the ‘real’ world – the immediate physical world of their existence; sensitizing them towards issues that
don’t affect them directly but defines the collective conscience of a society. It is also an opportunity to
correct historical wrongs that have been left uncorrected and continue to haunt the education system.

The present generation of students in our schools are better evolved in comparison to the millennial
generation (born between the early 1980s and the dawn of the 21st century). They have a technological
edge over their teachers who are not as adept in accruing the advancements in the field of technology.
They have a whole new array of career choices to opt for, better mobility, more avenues for pursuing their
passion, etc. But at the same time, they are also regressed. Their inability to manage their time and
resources, emotional disconnect, self-immersion, the real-virtual divide they oscillate between is
presenting a host of challenges, the educators are ill-equipped to address and deal with.

References:

Discussant: Sheena M. Racuya