A young teacher (elementary school, middle school, high school, college, grad school, tech school) is preparing for a class. What should he do?
Depending on his picture of what should happen in the class, he has several options. Usually, some other authority also has a say in what should happen in "his" class. Generally, he cannot use all the options. He probably has to choose one or two.
The oldest picture is that "knowledge" is language or skill possessed by the student. So, the teacher tells the students what he knows that he thinks they should know. Those that do know now show their knowledge by telling the teacher the important knowledge they have learned.
From the days of John Dewey, a newer picture is one of "engagement". Don't have all the students merely sit and listen. Instead, break them into small groups and let them suggest projects related to the new material their group can work on, create, disseminate, and later explain to the other groups.
A third approach is that of extension, comparison and criticism. Now that the student has learned from the teacher, what can the student do with the new knowledge in addition to repeat it? Well, she can extend it to new fields and areas, she can compare the material learned to older or competing or more recent material, showing strengths, weaknesses, combinations. Relatedly, she can criticize the new knowledge for conceptual gaps, contradictions, errors of fact and anything else she can find.
In many situations, there is some sort of test or examination to gauge whether the student has learned successfully. Naturally, the type of test often has a big influence on how and what the student studies and performs. Generally, the test or examination can be faked in one way or another so that there is only the appearance of learning. One way of faking it is to use false identification. That allows an expert or other substitution for the student to take the student's test or present "test results" that were not made by the student.
I haven't heard of school tests on any level that allow or even encourage the student to use a smartphone or computer during the test but we may come to that. We do, after all, have computers, libraries and phones at hand in many other situations.
Outside of schooling, much learning and experiencing takes place without any formal assessment of learning. We attend talks or read books but are not formally tested on them. We still have our own internal notions of any gain.
