More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 19 - March 23, 2019
The world has changed — and continues changing — rapidly and radically when it comes to the ways in which we can learn, and what knowledge, skills, dispositions, and forms of literacy our children will need to flourish in their futures.
Yes, what will this change look like? Change seems so slow.
to get equal access to an education. Between that and the ancillary child care functions they provide, schools as places where children come together to learn will not be going away anytime soon.
Will it continue to look like an 8 hour day and being bussed to a common location?
online learning platform Coursera
Check this
(MITx, for example, is a program that lets students take MIT courses for free, then pay a small fee for a certificate of completion after passing a test),
name the most crucial factor for future success,
creativity and “managing the growing complexity of the world.” I
Access doesn’t grant the ability to stay on task when we need to get something done.
Khan Academy, a
Knewton, which
school as a place our kids go to learn with others, to be inspired by caring adults to pursue mastery and expertise, and then to use that to change the world for the better.
Our scores reflect our very deep issues with poverty, not inherent problems with schools.)
It’s about developing the kinds of habits and dispositions that deep, lifelong learners need to succeed in a world rife with information and connections.
Developing creativity, persistence, and the skills for patient problem solving, B.S.-detecting, and collaborating may now be more important than knowing the key dates and battles of the Civil War (after all, those answers are just a few taps on our phones away), but they’re all much more difficult to assign a score to. I’m not saying that a foundation of content knowledge
How can we begin to move schools to become places of more relevant, connected, creative learning? Even with a plan, it won’t be easy.
as much as we may find many of them increasingly irrelevant, old-school expectations aren’t going away overnight — educational change moves too slowly for that. Until that transition is complete, we still need to make sure kids can pass the test and, if they aspire to, get into college.
where do we start? An obvious place is working to make sure all students and teachers have Web access through their own personal devices.
Still only accessible to those who can afford it.
you’re a teacher, start by looking at and changing your personal and professional practice around learning. Develop your own connections and networks on sites like Twitter and Classroom20.com, and start creating an education for yourself around the topics you have a passion for.
Hmmm, recheck out Twitter and Classroom20
Personal Learning Networks, one of my books,
all the things our children are using to connect and learn outside the classroom — social media, cell phones, Internet connections — are banned inside classrooms.
How do we not ban these but keep students safe?
The only place. Why is that?
Remaking assessment starts with this: Stop asking questions on tests that can be answered by a Google search.
!!!
Share everything (or at least something)
Sharing comes in many forms. It may be a blog where we reflect on our work, or a video that captures a process. It may even just be a PDF of the paper handout that was the foundation of an outstanding group project. The form almost doesn’t matter (although it must be digital).
science teacher Terie Engelbrecht, from Marengo Community High School in Marengo, Illinois. Terie’s
Discover, don’t deliver, the curriculum
“We have to stop delivering the curriculum to kids. We have to start discovering it with them.”
The key, of course, is having the ability to find them, vet them, and bring them safely into the learning lives of your students.
more important, it’s a chance to teach kids how to do this for themselves.
Be a master learner
the knowledge we have access to is constantly changing and being updated, unlearned, and relearned.
much of what we “learn” in school quickly becomes irrelevant or outdated
the world cares that you can keep learning.
If we’re to develop learners who can make sense of the whole library, we must already be able to do that ourselves. In other words, the adults in the room need to be learners first and teachers second.
In times of great abundance, however, what our children really need are master learners with enough content expertise to help them discover the curriculum.
raising the expectations that teachers will take part in ongoing professional development of their own interest and making.
Do real work for real audiences
Keep this in mind
starting this year, even with our children in K–5, at least half of the time they spend on schoolwork must be on stuff that can’t end up in the Friday Folder?
should be because their work is something they create on their own, or with others, that has real value in the real world.
lots of creating our kids can do with traditional tools that can serve a real audience. Publishing books, putting on plays, and doing community service are just a few examples. But what if we
Our students are capable of doing authentic work that adds to the abundance in ways that can make the world a better, richer place.
Transfer the power
Don’t teach my child science; instead, teach my child how to learn science — or history or math or music.
None of these realities existed when Frederick Taylor fashioned the first factory-type schools, whose main purpose was to prepare kids to obey, follow a schedule, and be trained and retrained for the assembly-line jobs most of them were going to take on.
about working together to solve the really big problems we’ll face together in the years ahead.
Over a six-month period, she went to parent meetings, coffees, and other informal gatherings to listen to what the parents reading the book had to say about it.
What do we value enough to make us ensure our children take it away from their “school” experience, in whatever form that takes?
instead of passing the test, we made those ever-more important skills of networking, inquiry, creation, sharing, unlearning, and relearning the answer to the “why school” question. Imagine what our kids could become if we helped them take full advantage of all they have available to them for learning.
Will at whyschoolbook.com and via Twitter at @willrich45 and #whyschoolbook. About the author A parent of two teenagers, Will Richardson has been thinking and writing about the intersection of social online learning networks and education for the past 10 years at weblogg-ed.com, and for the past two years at willrichardson.com.
