Government texts describes political efficacy as "a belief that you can take part in politics or that government will respond to the citizenry." What about educational efficacy? To what extent do students participate in their own education, and how much can they anticipate their teachers will respond?
For instance, you can read the various rants about the nature of classroom assignmnets. Many of them boil down to the accusation that teachers are "lazy" and assign meaningless work, simply to give students an arbitrary effort grade. Why bother?
Respectively, I designed an explicit syllabus of relevant work. All testing and reading dates are clearly outlined. Yet how many of our class members have actually read ALL the assigned readings? How many have taken notes on their reading? How many have in any way, shape, or form tried to negotiate meaning on their own? But when the average AP class grade is a 76%, and many students earn Ds and Fs, guess who gets blamed for your low test scores? When teachers issue low grades, where does the blame lie?
The majority of students rely on the teacher to provide the answers. It's a fact that the one doing the talking is doing the learning--so I'm really, really smart about government textbook topics. I create (although sometimes steal) power points, I explain them to the class, yet YOU are supposed to learn.
Once and for all, get in my brain! This would be so much easier if you all just would hop right into my head! Does anyone have any answers to this conundrum???
Education
17 years ago