Teaching Digital Natives: Marc Presnky and Partnering in the 21st Century Classroom

The book utilized in my college course takes an interesting look into a new wave of education that is modeled around using the new technology available in our world to assist in educating youth and changing the typical roles of teacher and student. Marc Prensky, the author of the text, believes that teachers need to prepare their students for the future. He believes that creatively using technological tools as a way to achieve academic goals will give them a better development in a world where technology usage is growing rapidly. He believes that partnering is the way to achieve this. When it comes to partnering in the classroom, some teachers are hesitant in approaching this concept. Marc Prensky, from Chapter 1 of his "Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning," points out that an alternative to direct instruction would be no whole-class lecturing. This would come as a shock to many teachers in public schools that rely heavily on this, but as Prensky points out this is becoming highly ineffective. He believes that the teacher needs to only give students questions to be answered and the tools or places to start. The ownership or responsibility to cover the required curriculum of the class is on the students. This can definitely be met with some resistance as well. Not everyone is willing to try new ways of teaching and some people feel more comfortable with a direct instruction approach. Partnering is never something that can quite happen over night, but will start to change as the way we teach is adapted to the 21st century. At least I can only hope so.

Students can surely adapt to this new way of learning. I, especially, believe that students would be willing to make a larger commitment to their education if they believed they were doing something that could change the world. The power to find out on your own what you need to know and choose the technologies that suit you will give students a sense of autonomy that is often missing a great deal from the classroom. Students want to learn and adapt their knowledge to help aid the future as well as the here and now. As a teacher, I hope to adopt some of these new roles. I think serving as a guide, questioner, and designer of learning is something I should strive for as a young educator.

The great thing about partnering, which I must point out now, is how students' are able to follow their own individual path. They may all be given the same set of questions but how they arrive at the answer or how they present their findings is entirely up to them. They can follow their passions. This is something else I will bring up in another post. We all have passions and these students' in our future classrooms are no different. They should be given the opportunity to explore them because it will give much more meaning to the learning process.