Prepared for what?
We desperately need . . . we may not survive without . . . a generation of young people who are imaginative, inventive, fearless learners, and compassionate leaders. Yet, what can we say, as educators, about the students we are producing?
We can prove that they can read, do basic math on paper, and they are able to sit for hours filling in bubble sheets. No generation in history has ever been so thoroughly prepared for the industrial age.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/02/16/happy-birthday-jude/
Please comment.
8 comments:
Last night my son had an assignment to properly cite his sources; propper punctuation, spacing etc.
there is a tool he knows, Citation machine, that will automatically put in the ,;: and for him. Why this assignment.
Much of what we do is so 19th century.
This thought is multiply provocotive.
Are we,as teachers, getting in the way of their fearless imagination? I think so!!! Teachers don't yet see technology as a form of literacy, yet to be literate in this age means accessing,navigating, and creating within an ever changing technological world.
If we prepare young people to really develop these qualities, we are essentially preparing them to make the promise of democracy a reality. From where does the resistance to this come from, because it certainly does not come from young people themselves?
Many teachers will stiffen up when they hear this. How do we begin a conversation that identifies "how has learning changed? What "new" skills and knowledge must teach our children? In a world that is rapidly changing, how do we really create lifelong learners? Most of today's students will have 10-18 jobs in their lifetime. Most of those jobs do not exist today. Kids will not be coming back to our schools to learn the skills for these new jobs. What will they need to know in order to learn in the future?
Here are some more thoughts to cause a conversation:
Digital Kids. Analog Schools.
A few quotes to spark some conversation...
We desperately need . . . we may not survive without . . . a generation of young people who are imaginative, inventive,
fearless learners, and compassionate leaders. Yet, what can we say, as educators, about the students we are producing?
We can prove that they can read, do basic math on paper, and they are able to sit for hours filling in bubble sheets.
No generation in history has ever been so thoroughly prepared for the industrial age.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/02/16/happy-birthday-jude/
I’m getting tired of hearing people continue to ask for the evidence that technology helps students learn. It doesn’t matter.
We know that good teachers help students learn. We need technology in every classroom and in every student and
teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our
world.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/05/22/curriculum-is-dead/
As educators, we are not grasping (or prepared for) the depth of the change that is occurring under our feet. If it's
happened (breaking apart the center) in every other industry - movies, music, software, business - what makes us think
that our educational structures are immune? And what does it mean to us? What should we be doing now to prepare our
institutions? Ourselves? Our learners? We should all be thinking about that.
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2006/03/07#a4796
While we teach whatever we teach at school, the kids go home and learn the skills they need to survive and prosper in an
interconnected global economy.
Incrementally changing our teaching methods, slowly bringing people up to speed . . . worked fine when ideas of literacy
and education were not rapidly changing; but they are. We need to be able to leapfrog in our understandings, in our
methods, and in our tools, allowing us to move to where the kids are. If we do not become leaders to our students, we will
be followers, seen as irrelevant, and left to cry in our books while the kids are off setting the agenda.
http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2005/11/educational_lea.html
The kids who start school today will be retiring in the year 2065, and yet we know as little about what the world will look
like then as we do five years from now. We can give them all the content we want, but in this age, in won’t make much
difference if we don’t teach them how to learn first. And they do that not by spitting back at us what they “know.” They do it
by being creative, by trying and failing, by succeeding and reflecting.
A couple of more notches in the school is irrelevant belt.
http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/learning-to-learn-2/
The academic world is incrementalist by nature and . . . this has worked (such as it has) because the underlying
structures and assumptions for and by educators have remained the same . . . . Things are no longer the same -
technology and students . . . are changing at rates never seen before. . . . A revolution is happening outside of our control,
in our student population, and there will be a tipping point in this process when the academy finds itself wholly inadequate
and unsuitable to those they presume to serve . . . and no time to patch their outmoded mechanisms.
http://www.chrislott.org/2006/06/20/dead-teachers-and-tipping-points/
www.scottmcleod.net/storage/digitalkids.pdf
No one jumps a 20 foot chasm in two 10 foot jumps.
http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/
2006/06/literacy_as_bat.html (see Guhlin comment)
Our kids are connected. Technology is part of their lives.
But. . . . it’s not technology, it’s information. These gadgets
are their links to information. These gadgets represent
intellectual appendages to our children. They are the hands
and feet that carry children to new experiences, and cutting
these links is like cutting an appendage - and that makes
no constructive sense to these children and their world view.
Yet we try to cut it off.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2005/08/24/our-schools-are-leaking/
One of our problems has been that we have tried to shape the technology around outdated notions of what schooling is
about, rather than reshaping our notions to reflect new world conditions. . . . In a rapidly changing world, it becomes much
less valuable to be able to memorize the answer, and much more valuable to be able to find and even invent the
answers. . . . We can’t keep up with making the technology the curriculum. All we can do is prepare our students to teach
themselves. It’s the only way to keep up.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2005/12/16/so-whats-different-some-answers/
Information, to [my son], is never finished. It’s just a raw material with which he can make something new. It is important,
I believe, that we look at curriculum the same way, that it is a raw material, something that we can mix in different ways,
and produce learning experiences that help our students to teach themselves. I think it may also be interesting and
valuable to treat our students and ourselves the same way. That rather than graduating finished students, who are ready
for the world, that we produce people who are raw material, capable of not only adapting to a rapidly changing world, but
also able to continue to learn, unlearn, and relearn, so that they can shape that world into something that is better.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/03/07/finished-products-are-no-more/
Should we be asking What should we reasonably expect our education system to achieve in the next ten years? or should
we ask What should today’s children reasonably expect from our education system over the next ten years? I think that
our children have every reason to expect a lot more.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/01/11/asking-the-right-questions/
When we can not clearly predict our children’s future, it becomes much less important what they are learning, and much
more important how they are learning it, and what they are doing with it. Guhlin said that the practices of innovative
teachers are considered “untried and untrue because they don’t connect with the traditional environment of school.”
I think that the real story is that our schools are not connecting to (relevant to) their own goals, preparing children for their
future.
It’s the demands of . . . society and our children’s future that need to be made into a story, and then told in compelling
ways back to the community (and to communities of teachers). It requires that we observe, speculate, converse, and
construct a compelling story that clearly defines what children need to be learning, and how they need to be learning it,
and in what kinds of classrooms (or not) it should be happening in. That story has to connect to a marketplace, to deeply
held values, and it needs to be something that we can point to and say, “Isn’t that the kind of education your children
deserve?”
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/03/19/reactions-to-podcast-40-redefining-telling-the-new-story/
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_
users/2005/03/incremental_vs_.html
Our children need to know how to collaborate, share, share decision making, understand each other,truly communicate. Can they do this?
I think almost everything about schools demonstrates that we are trying to ensure that no results will change: stratified results along race and class lines, preparation for an industrial age, relatively passive, tractable students. What I think we need to do is empower kids. I'm not sure we yet have the vision to lead children--at this point, we need to equip/support/engage them and get out of their way.
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