As teachers who were also once students, it's very easy to focus on memorization and their ability to give us information to get a good grade. When we spoke about this in the key learning workshop on choice, it really resonated with me. We always talk about how for students the marks don't matter and the students should focus more on the learning and critical thinking skills instead of a grade. But how can we say that when we once as students also cared about how to get the grades? When I was a student throughout high school and university I also did just memorize for the sake of the "A" more times than I can count, but in reality, any of that information I would just immediately forget and I gained nothing from that topic.
The only reason I tried to break out of that and focus on developing skills was because of my dad talking about people going into his job with degrees not being able to think their way out of a box. This was something that I really wanted to make sure I didn't fall into that category, and this is something that is super important to instill in our students. Trying to teach them that they can care about the grade but they don't really benefit from memorization but instead gaining critical thinking skills and rationalizion skills. A good start to encouraging this type of thinking is to give assessments, projects, and ask questions that are abstract to inspire actual learning and understanding of the content to take place. This responsibility falls on us as teachers, to instead of encouraging the box, allow them to develop the skills to move around the box and problem solve, because no matter the subject or where they go in life, students will always need the ability to critically think and problem solve.
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