Goldenberg Article

"True education-real teaching- involves helping students think, reason, comprehend, and understand important ideas." This quote at the beginning of Goldenberg's article, for me, sums up what education is all about, and a main reason in why I want to become a teacher. In schools today, too much of instruction is based on memorizing facts or procedures, and at the end of the day students have no idea why they learned these things, and how to apply these important ideas to every day life. As a teacher, I believe it is my job to create not only outstanding learners but to create outstanding people and citizens. To be this, students have to question things they don't understand, back their ideas with evidence and research, and hopefully by doing this will find that they will understand important ideas that our world has to deal with and be able to find solutions to problems and reasons to keep good things going. In my classroom I want to provide my students with "more intellectually demanding learning opportunities that promote the enlarged understanding of ideas and values". By doing this, it is my goal to educate my students how to be productive citizens not only in the United States but also in a global community.
Through instructional conversation or ICs, teachers and students have the opportunity to bounce ideas off one another with a main concept or goal the teacher has in mind. Usually this concept or goal is themed around an important ideal that is goaled at making the world a better place through better citizens. ICs demand full participation from all students and also demand that students are to engage in conversation with each other more than the teacher. Teachers are only to be used a facilitators and to keep the students on task with the main concept in mind. In a past field experience I have seen this technique used to great success. The teacher modeled appropriate behavior and language to be used during such conversations, and to make sure the students were engaging with each other the teacher would block his eyes, not making contact forcing the students to look at each other and converse. Through these conservations and opportunities to expand their understanding of certain topics, students gained different perspectives about an issue and were in return better apt to form their own opinion. I look forward to imploring this technique in my future classroom and would recommend it to all other teachers and future teachers.