Group items tagged

“single best idea for reforming K-12 education”.

Root cause: factory model of management

The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.

Members of any profession need to communicate and collaborate with colleagues to understand and improve their skills. Face-to-face collaboration is personal, but is limited by boundaries of time and space. Participants must have a common time and place for collaboration. Digital collaboration has no bounds of time or space, and collaboration can take place anytime with anyone, anywhere.

Technology is not a generational thing, it is a learning thing. It may be outside many educators’ comfort zones, but comfort zones are the biggest obstacles to education reform.

The time has come for educators to accept that they no longer have a choice about technology. To maintain relevance as educators, they need to employ relevant technology learning tools for education, connect and collaborate with other professionals to improve their skills and knowledge within their profession, and use PLNs to improve their profession and hold off the barbarian politicians and business people banging down the gates of education

Given the enormous impact that technology has had on nearly every other aspect of our society, how can that be?

Today our collective vision for education is broader, our nation is more complex and diverse, and our technical capabilities are more powerful. But we continue to assume the factory-model classroom and its rigid bell schedules, credit requirements, age-based grade levels, and physical specifications when we talk about school reform.

our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do.

Unlike most school reformers floating 'tweak-the-status-quo' proposals these days (let's test kids more! let's get rid of a few teachers! let's make school longer! let's lecture better!), the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents (CAPSS) decided to swing for the fences:

that factory-model schooling was not just ineffective but actually harmful to most students—a message which had been so radical and out of the mainstream twenty years ago, actually sounded very much like the messages of my other guests.

the Internet has become an unparalleled platform for learning, intitiative, participation, productivity, and creativity, almost all of this happens outside of formal educational institutions

technology as a liberating force

“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who is now in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture.

seeing this “human aspect” of education?

14th century France inhabited a relatively simple personal world with maybe three sides: farm, village, and the church. Today ordinary individuals construct amazingly complex personal worlds with many facets. The game has truly changed.

"elephant in the room," a big conspicuous but largely undiscussed problem: What should we do with tired content?

If only we could shrink some topics, we could expand others that offer much more.