I am still waiting for education circles to realize how hard we work to maintain the status quo and perpetuate a system that made US successful. Consider the way that the system responds to “popular” books and authors like Daniel Pink.
One of the points of Daniel Pink’s new book “Drive” is the need for people to develop autonomy in a Motivation 3.0 environment. Guess what: education does a terrible job of cultivating this in kids. We actually work really, really hard to prevent kids from being autonomous. We give them due dates for assignments, we provide them with detailed assignment sheets, and generate intricate rubrics to make sure that kids do not have to be responsible for their own learning and develop their own ideas.
We even do everything possible to make sure that autonomy stays out of schools. When Pink’s last book came out “A Whole New Mind” educators everywhere were raving about how we need to teach kids this way to make sure they are successful. More creativity! More right-brain thinking! More glitter and glamour! Still, schools maintained the same structure and curriculum as before. Teachers could simply take the concepts in “A Whole New Mind” and apply them to the existing structure with minimal, if any, alteration. Brilliant!
Then word of Pink’s new book came about and the same people were raving about how now we can get closer to understanding how to stimulate engagement in kids and get them to act as lifelong learners!
Then those same people read the book (or the premise of it). How could anyone advocate for autonomy in schools? It would be utter chaos!
Here’s my point: isn’t it amazing how we only advocate for the “research” that allows us to maintain the status quo? Don’t even get me started on the “Flat World”.
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How do we change it? How much can we do in our own classrooms? I stopped handing out rubrics at the beginning of assignments and had students tell me that I’m not doing my job. I have flexible timelines in my class and have colleagues accuse me spoiling the students and failing my responsibility to prepare them for university. I tell colleagues that they don’t have to make Q1 worth 50% and Q2 the other 50% of the course grade and we get complaints from parents. And none of these actions are radical, none of them are the change needed. How can we make a difference in our little slice of the world?