If you talk to any teacher that has been teaching for the past 20 years or more, you are bound to find the majority of them are desensitized to paradigms shifts in education. These educators are either on the front lines fighting Common Core or in the back of the class doing the same as they always have and just waiting passively for the next shift to come about. I was interested to hear that it isn't just the US that is desperately searching for a new education system for their children. It makes sense though, that everyone, everywhere are having to come up with a way to legitimize standardized education in light of the world's resources being at everyone's fingertips. Sir Ken Robinson points out that children today are challenging the purpose of having to go to school at all. That they are actually just in this opinion because now a days having a degree doesn't guarantee you the american dream. The problem as Robinson explains is that everyone's answer to this search for a new paradigm is to raise standards of education. Instead of this dime a dozen answer, Robinson asks us to consider promoting divergent thinking. This divergent thinking is defined by Robinson not as creativity, but as having many different answers and varied pathways to those answers. Education thus far has trained our students to having to know the "one true answer". This is oh so evident in my current classroom. We judge our teachers on how many of our student's know that one true answer. We judge our schools on how many students know the one true answer. This leaves us with a mob of sameness and zero growth. Nobody ever got anywhere with zero growth. I cannot speak for those teachers that have been jaded by going through so many of the "new and improved" ways of educating our students. I can only say that as a new teacher coming into the field in such an dynamic time, I am so excited that people like Sir Ken Robinson and his divergent thinking about education are speaking on the behalf my future students and my future career. I would be proud to be a teacher in Robinson's vision of educational growth.
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Megan BallacheyClassical educator of Anatomy & Physiology, Biology, and AP Biology for Temecula Preparatory School. Archives
May 2015
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