Concepts Of A Democratic Classroom

Decent Essays
-What would a democratic classroom look like? How would it function?
We have been discussing the concept of a democratic classroom in class for quite a while now and I think I have concluded that a democratic classroom is simply a classroom that incorporates student choice and a balanced level of power between the students and the teacher. Now that whole idea seems at least to me to be the ideal for most educators, because it would give the students an investment in their education and the power to pursue their own learning. This would make the students self-sufficient as learners, which makes your job as the educator easier, because now you only need to bring the information to the student. You no longer need to try to convince your student
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For instance, they can have all the power they want to pursue whatever they want to learn, but it is still a history class and we still need to meet the standards within this class. I as the educator would thus put my power over them to use and direct them in this direction. That is why I think an actual perfect democratic classroom would have to have no direction established and would need to be completely student idea lead. This simply does not happen in our education systems and for the most part cannot happen in our current system. This is why democratic classrooms end up looking like this weird allusion of student choice and power when for the most part that power is being directed and controlled by the teacher. That is, generally, what I believe a democratic classroom looks like from my perspective. However, I do not think this is inherently a bad thing. It does a very good job giving students more choice and options within the confines that the teacher sets. For instance, the Barton and Levstik book we are reading mentions how …show more content…
I just do not know yet if I could actually pull it off. Sure, it is easy for me to say that my ideal learning community would be a democratically operated classroom that focuses more on discussion than on information dumping/Banking education model. I can think of many things I will not do and that I believe will not work. For instance, I would never create a “traditional” or old school rowed classroom with all the students sitting in an orderly fashion. I would prefer either to have table groups or a more horseshoe design layout for the class. I personally just feel like right now though all of my ideas revolve around things I do not want to do in my classroom. This mindset I feel limits my own original or new ideas, because I’m so focused on the flaws I see in other classrooms that I’m having a difficult time looking at how I want to teach over how I don’t want to teach. Having said that I would like to present my ideal classroom set up and how it would run as best I can without thinking of other teachers ' classrooms as a model to fix, but by just thinking of a classroom environment I would like to create an in generally be

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