Awesome.

I ran across some stuff I quite liked in the Brookfield (is that his name?) article, stuff that gets to the heart of some things that have been eating at me. Here they are, with my quick responses.

"Before students can engage critically with ideas and actions, they may need a period of assimilation and grounding in a subject area or skill set. Lecturing may be a very effective way of ensuring this" (4).
This is where I've been a little squeamish on some of our readings. Yes, it's great to be interactive. Students get bored when they're not involved. But we're also more qualified than them to be teaching things. Maybe only marginally so, but more qualified nevertheless. Building everything around lecture is obviously a bad idea, but so is avoiding lecture entirely.

"Students will be highly skeptical of group discussion if the teacher has not earned the right to ask students to work this way by first modeling her own commitment to the process" (5).
This one made me think. We (I) tend to assume group work is good by default, but maybe it isn't always. This is something I'll have to be more conscious of than I would have otherwise.

"To students who have made great sacrifices to attend an educational activity, a teacher's attempts to deconstruct her authority through avowals of how she'll learn more from the students than they will from her rings of false modesty" (6).
Again, good stuff to hear. I feel like some of the concepts we've discussed about group equality, while not without merit, tend to devalue the teacher. No matter how you feel about the power relationship and our position relative to our students, we ARE in a position of authority and need to bring certain things to the table, to use a bit of a cliche.

Just a few thoughts, but this article was definitely refreshingly different than some of the others and felt pretty realistic.