What do you see as the biggest challenges facing formal education?
by Doug Belshaw • March 23, 2011 • FAQ • 3 Comments
Some brief thoughts, brought to you with the letter ‘A’:
1. Assessment – outdated, outmoded, and increasingly irrelevant. Are the things we test worth testing?
2. Authenticity – with both schools and universities expected to be businesses in a marketplace, how do they resolve the tension between this and their more traditional standards-based role?
3. Agility – as neither fish nor fowl, how do institutions respond to pressures from the market, stakeholders and the government in a timely fashion?
4. Acceleration – what happens when a body of knowledge is our of date before a student finishes a course?
5. Access – when people can learn from anyone, anywhere about anything, who will be the new gatekeepers?
Hi Doug,I touched on this in a reply to one of your tweets (I think). Education or how it is delivered makes me get my soap box out! I refer your you to my earlier tweet your honour. Now I may seem to to go off topic but bear with me as I have just spent the last hour shouting at the tv.Insane? No but my theory is based on insanity, well at least Einstein’s definition of insanity and that is “Doing the same things over and over and expecting different results”. Yes I’m referring to “Jamie’s Dream School”. However, is mainstream school any different? No, the logic is the “cream of the teaching crop” will bring out the best. Well ……. I don’t think so.So my tweet …… you thought I’d forgotten …. tut, tut. My tweet was about Pareto, who brought about the 80/20 rule which can be applied to most if not all things in life, e.g.20% of the population hold 80% of the wealth …..My opinion may seem so wrong to many, but I feel for way too long now we have focussed on the 20%, the assessments, the technology, the modern buildings with all the state of the art learning environments. But whose vision is this? It’s an ideal of individuals who have a passion for education, a passion for tech (i’m not getting at you Doug, honest!), all STUCK, yes STUCK, in the 20%. So what’s in the 80% I hear you shout? Well it’s the students (I know ….. I’m so predictable!).Get to the point David! Well it would be no surprise to me to find that one of Dougs top values is education, and Doug I expect you most if not all the answers to life through learning and education? It’s clearly what drives you, it excites you, you love it ……. ergo it’s easy. I was told at a young age to “find my bliss”, and it wasn’t until 10 years ago that I understood what it meant.”He who knows others is learned, he who knows himself is truly wise” Lao Tse.In the 80% we look for the values, the interest, the desire and focus there. No one ever liked doing something they were rubbish at? But isn’t it amazing how passionate or how much energy we have when we do things we enjoy. So why do we do the same things over and over and expect different results?It time to drastically change but not the 20%!!! Help, students find their talents and your guaranteed to find a passion, no one get hated anything they excelled at?So the challenges are clear for me, it’s too easy to focus on the tangible, the challenge is to understand the intangibles, the students. When I started my apprenticeship my manager told me that his job as with ALL Managers is not to make sure I’m not slacking, but it was to make sure I had all the tools I needed for the job, secondly that I knew how to them and lastly to present it to me in a way that I understood. Fortunately for me my first manager was my Dad.Possbly not one of the responses you may have been expecting, but it drives me mad seeing square pegs shoved into round holes and the teacher get angry when it doesn’t fit. Please ayt least give me some credit for painstakingly tying this out on my HTC! So please excuse my spelling and grammar.:)
I work at a charter school in the USA — the public money goes to a private school in the hope of stimulating innovation… and the school hires people who used to work in the public school. So we have structures very similar to the public school — lesson plans, conforming to standards, textbooks and isolated curricula. The biggest challenge in the USA is “how do we use the infromation culled by Neil Postman, Dennis Littky, Ted sizer and other pioneers?” I recommend bigpicture.org and metcenter.org and hightechhigh.org as a start. I’m reading Dr. Abraham Fischler’s blog TheStudentIstheClass.com and I have a list of 24 quotes that I hope will form a skeleton of a course. See the quotes at GuideontheSide.com. I apppluad your list of five “A”s, DOug, and I hope to chat with you at some point. SteveMathTeacher@gmail.com +1 954 646 8246. I hope you can reach me. Fascinating blog. I also recomend the works of Daniel Pink, particularly DRIVE. Great piece on youtube if you look at “dan pink drive”. Steve McCrea Fort Lauderdale FLIf you are ever in the USA, give a call and I’d like to fly up to where you are to share ideas.