Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

BEFORE

& AFTER

story of 2 middle-aged teachers with over 50 years of classroom experience between us who are striving to reinvent ourselves. You can read our bio and learn more about our workshop by going to our conference web page in Squidoo at Small Changes; Big Returns.

There are so many distractions beckoning me away from the task of getting ready. E-mails and other subscriptions that come to my desk (thanks, Mark), software and social sites that must be tried out, marking and prep for next week, and even housework and lawn-mowing (although the fall rains have started so that excuse is not looking so good today) -- they all conspire to keep me off task!

In an effort to get my thoughts to gel, I have been re-reading Daniel Gurh's post and responses in that blogathon I mentioned in an earlier entry. Dan makes an argument in favour of structured education and sees a central role for teachers.

He speaks about the continuing need to provide young people with (a) opportunities for guided discovery and (b) a learning framework that will engender insight which comes with the ability to organize one's thoughts. Knowledge acquisition is not (and has never been) enough. Students packing their own minds with a compendium of facts, sound bites and video clips -- no matter how impressive the collection -- is not to be confused with the ability to process the information, to create something new with it, or to use it to solve a problem.

Just experience the typical California mall filled with Californian teenagers (of the iphone / MySpace / Twitter generation).

What you can observe is a tremendous amount of communication noise (they are teenagers after all). Little structure(again, a teenage issue). But also a lack of problem solving skills, any linguistic precision (which impairs the ability to transact), and few coherent trains of thought (arising from operating in mental snippets driven by TV commercials and SMS).

All the while their eyes are glued to their iPhone / whatever. The earth could shake and they would not notice. Their immediate environment, society, insight are all relegated to the backburner.

What is obvious is that many lack a framework to interact with the world in an insightful way. That is a role of parents, teachers, and all falls back to providing these teenagers with a framework to discover the world rather than just produce communication noise.

I would add that we teachers must also actively model insightful response to the issues and information that flow around us. To raise thinking students, we must be seen to be thinking teachers.

 QUESTION: If you consider the photo above as an analogy, would 21st century learning be the rock or the stream?