Students | Learners | |
Relationship with educators | Students are employees, required to obediently follow instructions. | Learners are citizens with a vested interest in the learning society. |
Relationship with other “Students” | Students are competitors | Learners are collaborators |
Motivation | Obligation: Students are culturally obliged to work for the teacher & for compensation (below) | Responsibility: Learners are motivated by an understood and realized “value” in their work, especially when it is valuable to others. |
Compensation | Institution defined grades and gateways to college (another institution) and a good job (another institution) | A sense of ongoing accomplishment that is not delivered but earned, and not symbolic but tangible and valuable — an investment. |
Mode of Operation | Compliant, group-disciplined, objective-oriented, and trainable | Persevering, self-disciplined, group- and goal-oriented, resourceful, and learning in order to achieve rather than achieving learning. |
Why? | Compelled | Curious |
Equipped | ..with packaged knowledge and tools for recording packaged knowledge — prescribed and paced learning | ..with tools for exploring a networked variety of content, experimenting with that content, and discovering, concluding, and constructing knowledge — invented learning |
Assessment | Measuring what the student has learned. | Measuring what the learner can do with what has been learned. |
I try to help kids be "learners" rather than "students". Imagine if schools and districts could shift to the learner side of the table. It would be amazing!