Blog: Homesick for the chalkboard with crayons?

Beautiful how Yvonne Hagenaar in her blog 'Good teaching' in the breach for 'the' teacher. According to Hagenaar, teachers are people with an ideal: teaching, transferring knowledge and sharing knowledge. That makes them happy. Hagenaar looks back almost nostalgically to the days when teachers could simply do what they had become teachers for: Transferring their knowledge and expertise by teaching large groups of students face to face, preferably on a blackboard with a piece of chalk. Hagenaar is clearly less enamored of all the educational innovations and technological developments with which teachers are burdened these days. She calls the recent proposals of the Education Council, for example, "a possible attempt to get some publicity again under the guise of 'necessary innovation. It's nice to hear nostalgia... but it doesn't make for good teaching. A good teacher does indeed have -as Hagenaar outlines- a passion to share his knowledge and skills. But a good teacher will also always be open to new ways and possibilities to share that knowledge! Of course, there are some teachers who, out of passion for their profession, are able to tell such beautiful stories that they can captivate students for more than half an hour. But as a teacher you really need more than passion and a good story to really teach your critical young audience something. I have been teaching teachers and trainers how to use online learning tools for 20 years now. Replacing teachers with online learning resources is not the goal here. Rather, it is about giving teachers more tools and opportunities to share their knowledge and expertise. Better and more fun education is the goal. Don't get me wrong. Contact between teacher and student still leads to the best learning results. But that doesn't mean you have to lock them up in a classroom together for an average of 6 hours a day without digital teaching aids. Or are we also going to ban the Internet, digital content and computers in the classroom again? That's not good education, that's stupid.