his is the sixth time I've taught a unit on the Holocaust, each one slightly different than the last. In the past, my students learned most of the information via lecture, notes and videos. Because I was responsible for distilling the information, I learned much more than they did. This semester they're doing it all themselves. And the end result will be a classroom Holocaust museum curated by my grade 10 English students. The unit involves inquiry, collaborative, and project-based learning all in one.
Just as journalists must become more curator than creator, so must educators.
we need to move students up the education chain. They don’t always know what they need to know, but why don’t we start by finding out? Instead of giving tests to find out what they’ve learned, we should test to find out what they don’t know. Their wrong answers aren’t failures, they are needs and opportunities.
Google, he said, is looking for “non-routine problem-solving skills.
“In the real world,” he said, “the tests are all open book,
We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers.
Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company
Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability?
education serves a unique role in society of preparing individuals for the “vital combat for lucidity”.