9 Elephants In The Classroom

By Will Richardson


FUTURE DIRECTIONS - BIG QUESTIONS 

OUTSTANDING ARTICLE

One of the best articles I have read on these issues outlined below:
 Posted April 10/16,  by Zoe Branigan Pipe Facebook Enrichment Page.

I wonder if there is a ministry of education, anywhere around the world, that has addressed these elephants in the classroom.

I worked at a school in the 90's that due to the principal leadership did address these issues. But when he left the elephants returned.

Educational leaders and philosophers have been talking about these changes for decades. (Fullan, Kohn, Freire, Sir Ken Robinson, ) .

Ministers of Education, Directors of program at the Ministry, Directors of Education in Boards, (along with you Zoe, and George Couros and forward thinking educators) need to develop an Inquiry to change what we are doing or we are always going to get what we have gotten in the past.

Factory model classrooms, and curriculum are not the way of the future. Zoe Branigan-Pipe, the classroom environment you are developing should be in every classroom in Ontario.

Why isn't it? What do we do about it?

Mark

THE NINE ELEPHANTS: 
1.  Most knowledge we teach is forgotten after the test. What really needs to be taught?

2. How do we make schools engaging? Handing a student an iPad is not good enough.

3. How do we structure the physical environment of factory model schools for 21st Century teaching and learning?....and universities and colleges ?

4. We need to assess what matters. What actually matters? We need to stop training students for exams that computers can pass.

5.  Learning is being destroyed by administering grades.  Look at Kohn's research on what Grades do to learning.  See my Blogs Assessment Tab above.

6.  What should the 21st Century Curriculum look like?  We are not there yet.

7.  We know that separating learning into discrete subjects and time blocks is not the best way to prepare kids for the real world.Why are we doing it?  Even age groupings are not wise.  I had a grade 2 student who could beat every intermediate student in chess. What do we learn from that?

8.   We know the system of education as currently constructed is not adequately preparing kids for what follows if and when they graduate.  Look at Ontario's Math scores.  We better look at what we are doing to remedy that beyond add 20 minutes a day to that old fashioned Math block!

9. And finally, we know that learning that sticks is usually learned informally, that explicit knowledge accounts for very little of our success in most professions.


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