About a month ago some of my colleagues attended a showing of "Most Likely to Succeed". They came back feeling like this was something our faculty needed to watch. We paid to be able to show it at school and we all watched it together on our professional development day this week. I previewed it beforehand. The 2 minutes at the beginning of the movie were some of the best for me since most of the movie deals with high school students, but the whole movie is definitely thought-provoking. It makes you want to pack up and move to CA so that your children can have a High Tech High experience.
If you are involved in education or you care about your children's education, you should go to a screening. http://mltsfilm.org/
Some things I took away:
Education should be all about skills. The content knowledge can be found. It's free, growing and changing. Skills are how we differentiate from machines. Soft skills are what companies are looking for: confidence, critical thinking, time management, collaboration, ability to learn from criticism, ability to work independently.
Inert knowledge doesn't stick; 90% gone in a short period of time. Students who were asked to take a history test one year after first taking it, failed the test.
We are born wanting to learn. Schools grind it out of them. We are taught to memorize and deliver what the teacher wants.
We (teachers) have an idea of what we want finished projects to look like, but that's our idea, not their idea. Let them produce what they want to produce.
We all derive satisfaction from making something that wasn't there before.
We all learn through making mistakes; Next time you'll do it better.
Real education is messy. It's complex. It's about people. It's organic, growing and evolving.
The world is an interesting place. It's your job to probe it.
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This reminds me of a lesson I'm doing with my 6th graders. I basically give them a pile of recycled material and tell them to engineer an instrument out of them. (This time we had cardboard, all kinds of plastic bottles, cookie tins, string, elastics, plastic cups, small metal pieces, etc.) Before that we study the instruments of the orchestra, have a quiz, talk about how sound works and how that would affect making an instrument. After they make it, they compose a piece for it and notate in non-traditional notation. They have a blast and are really engaged. (One class asked if they could skip lunch to continue class) Of course, if you were to walk into my room and have no idea what I do it looked like a bunch of kids playing around in an extremely messy room. It's becoming my favorite lesson to do.
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