I've had the great opportunity to spend yesterday and today at Hathaway Brown. They have put on an impressive array of break out sessions and keynote speakers, all with the emphasis on how teaching (and schools) need to evolve for the hyper-connected world.
So where to start?
Thomas Friedman was Thursday night's key note address and spoke of how Americans are falling behind the rest of the world in many ways, including education. His main point was that being average will no longer lead to an average life style for our students. In a world so seamlessly connected, American students won't be competing with just their peers for jobs in our market, but will be competing against the best of the world. Companies don't have to "outsource" any longer. Everyone is globally connected and they will find the best suited workers from a global market.
So where does that leave us as educators? And I think the focus should be changing the way that students learn. Gone are the days of memorizing dates for history, vocabulary for Latin, equations for math. Our students have instant access to all of these things via the internet. What we need to teach now is how to digest and utilize the tools that they have at hand, how to think critically, how to collaborate with a group, and how to be creative.
And it is that last point that I want to stop on for a moment....how to be creative. I would like to reword my statement there a bit. Because I don't think we need to teach our students how to be creative, I posit that we need to structure schools in a way that they no longer stifle creativity. Standardized tests supply public schools and private schools alike with a way to measure our students, but what do they truly measure? Would an assessment not be more useful if simply utilized as a tool to diagnose where a student needs more support instead of having it determine their worth? But I digress...
If nothing else, Thomas Friedman lit a fire under me and left me wanting to divise even more ways to prepare our students for an ever-changing future and for jobs that have not even been created yet. After all, I'm a Latin teacher...long after my students have forgotten their first declension endings, I hope that they will still utilize problem solving skills, collaborative learning and teaching methods, and critical thinking that have been taught along with the language.
Next up was Paul Tough.
Paul emphasized nurturing not only our student's intellectual curiosity but also their overall character growth. He focused on a great many things in his talk but the one that stuck out to me was an individual's resilience or grit and how that was a deciding factor in that student graduating college and going on to live a happy life.
It seems that both an over abundance of adversity as well as a complete lack of adversity detract from an individual's grit. Those who end up being most resilient (and happiest) are the individuals who have been loved, nurtured, yet had lived through crises (whether they be a divorce, living through a natural disaster, a parent being laid off, etc...).
Move that same thinking into an educational setting and failure becomes the pivotal learning point. The classic responses to failure are to either brush it off and soldier on or internalize the failure as a reflection of self. Neither of these are constructive, nor are they useful in the real world. Our students need to learn how to analyze their failures and have the tools (and support) available to learn from them. They need to use that knowledge to then trouble shoot, redesign, and succeed. But what would the traditional response be to an initial failure? How many of us have seen a student get a paper or test with a bad grade returned to them who promptly threw it in the trash? There has to be a better way....
Now I know I've left you all (and myself) with more questions that answers, but I think they are important questions.
But on a completely unrelated topic, I will leave you all with a small snapshot of another talk by Jon Moser that really stuck with me on the topic of technology. Look to our students and how they are communicating and collaborating and that will be the future. We all e-mail on a daily basis, but poll your classes...do they use e-mail to communicate with their peers?
Stay hungry teachers and learn from your students! After all, teaching is the best reinforcement out there for learning.