Using student output

I found the discussion on the importance of using students’ output to affect your teaching and their learning quite useful. It is often falsely presumed that we are to be solely influencing our students in the classroom, but in reality, if we’re not being influenced by our students’ output, then we are not teaching to our full potential. The reason we give students tests, projects, homework and any other kind of assessment is to receive feedback from their performance that we then use to judge their understanding. If they are not performing up to par, we should then use that data to analyze what areas they need help in or what topics we should cover again. This same idea should be used when teaching in class, we cannot individualize each lesson plan to each student’s learning style, there are too many students and not enough time in the school day, but we can probably reach more students if we adjust our classroom and teaching style to use the feedback we are getting from students (output) while we’re teaching to relate what we think they should know or want them to learn to their lives.  We can also encourage them to do this on their own by using group learning practices in our classroom.  In this case, ideally students will receive output from each other and use this output to generate better understanding of concepts.