Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

Man, I have vivid memories of AP calculus. And that was... almost 20 years ago. At my school each class had 2 PCs: one for the teacher and one for the students. Our student PC was broken and the school apparently didn't have the resources to fix it. My calc teacher let us fix it for her, so we did. Then we started playing Grand Theft Auto (the original). In the game there's this chain of like 8 joggers we called the "school children" (meh, it was pixelated). We'd take turns trying to get a flame thrower and then finding the school children. Then you'd announce you were ready. The teacher would stop the lecture and we'd all go back to the computer to watch you try to flame thrower all the school children in a single go to get some giant bonus points. Then you rotated out. A couple weeks before the AP exam we all decided we should learn calculus so we started cramming. Most of us passed.

I guess his colleague found an excuse to for once do what he always wanted to.

I think the irony is that "could of" is often considered a nonstandard dialect form of "could have".

I am shocked--simply shocked--to discover that most teachers do not bother to view the experiences they supply from another perspective!

The tragedy of this article is that any lessons learned from such a stunt will not likely survive long enough to make any actual, substantial changes in public school pedagogy.

Students will continue to sit down and shut up, as they are expected to passively absorb all information given to them, to be regurgitated on demand. It would be difficult to change that even if you had the force of a published, peer-reviewed scientific study behind you, rather than just two days worth of anecdotes.

Not a teacher but an instructional designer. Digital courses tend to have very high dropout rates so my job is to design the best possible eLearning experience with maximum information/skill retention. I credit my successes (apologies for the shamelessness but it's necessary to make my point!) to my being a learner myself. It's simply not enough to know pedagogical, cognitive and design theories and techniques, you really have to become a learner yourself in order to get better at educating.

For example, in design stage where I'm scoping, scripting and storyboarding for a digital course, it's essential to keep close relationships with the subject matter experts and a sample of learners.

For the latter, one-off interviews are simply not enough. It's much more revealing when you station yourself "in the field" to observe and interact directly, so that you deeply understand their problems, work environment and ways of working. Even if you gain no new information, the experience will shape your design decisions and help make the course more "human."

But for subject matter experts, I tend to assume the role of the dumbest learner ever. Actually that's not very hard, I'm a slow learner myself! But by making no assumptions and asking the simplest questions, I find that I can get the course to flow better and much more easily digestible.

Brief stints are still not enough though. Outside my professional life, I take a few online courses to help me stay grounded and informed of the best and worst techniques. (And learn new things!)

So it really boils down to empathy. As educators we can suppose so much, but at the end of the day, it's the learners that receive it all. The closest we can get to understanding them is then to become learners ourselves.