John Dewey’s Pedagogic creed is his beliefs on how education should work as a whole. One of his major beliefs is that we are learning for the present and not for the future. Through this he means to have students learn about what is going on around them at the moment. Through learning about different things around them like how a business works in their community, they can not only learn different math skills, but they can learn different business strategies and life skills. Also, it means that teachers are just not teaching to the test at the end of the year. The kids will end up learning different lessons throughout the year and the material that they were supposed to end up learning as well. Another one of Dewey’s major beliefs was that learning needed to be experiential. Kids can not just learn form teachers lecturing or just talking to them, they need to go out into the world and experience it. I think that for me before the kids can go out and experience anything, they need to have some understanding of the topic before. This means the students will gain a grasp of a topic and once they see it in person they will be a lot more interested in it. He thought this was the best way of keeping students engaged with their learning. The last thing that he mentioned to some extent in his writing was that learning was a social and psychological experience for kids. While in schools kids will be engaging in different topics like math, English, or science. Although these topics are all beneficial to a students learning, they could miss a very vital part which is the social aspect of schools. Social learning is important at all ages, but especially at a younger age. At these younger ages kids learn how to communicate with other kids and with guidance, they learn how to do it right. Sometimes there isn’t that supervision and that is where they learn how to handle the situation themselves. Dewey mentioned how if a school is does not have both social and psychological learning, that it was not a solid place of learning.
In our discussions my group decided to focus on a couple of his main points and some topics that were related to his ideas. We focused on talking about the article as a whole, with all of his ideas and beliefs. Additionally we included lab schools into our discussion. We included lab schools because they are designed to create learning experiences for the students. Another topic we focused on was the No Child Left Behind act. This act try and helps schools by setting standards for the students to make on standardized testing. Even though they tried to do that, it ended up hurting the schools instead. If a school didn’t meet the standards after a certain number of years, they will give the kids vouchers to attend private schools, then they will start to take away more of the schools funding each year they miss the mark on the tests. The last thing that we focused on was Montessori schools. These schools are primarily for younger students around pre-school and kindergarten. At these schools they focus on what the kids want to learn about. If the student wants to learn about cheetahs that day, all the lessons will revolve around cheetahs. In the same sense if they don’t want to do anything that day, the teachers will try and convince them, but if they refuse they won’t do anything that day.
For our designs we used google slides to present our information and then we used a kahoot at the end of the experience to gain a grasp on the classes understanding of the material. I worked on the introduction, the preview of the information that we were presenting and the No Child Left Behind section. During the experience I was responsible for presenting the information that I had collected on the topics I wrote about. Also, helping guide discussion during and after the kahoot. The one reference that I looked at for information on the No Child Left Behind Act was edweek.org. They had all the information that I needed to know about to give a clear explanation to the class.The site also helped me gain a deeper understanding of how the government tried to help education, but in the end it hurt it. They later though reformed the law to help bring schools back to where they were before no child left behind.
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