One of the things that really struck me today was the fact that it seems we, in eduction, are constantly fighting systems. Systems that are bigger than us, as educators, bigger than our respective districts and bigger even than ODE!!
These systems box us in. We are publicly judged and sentenced by them. In the video Learning to Change - Changing to Learn, Yong Zhao talked about NCLB fading away... however, it seems that no matter which way we turn there are always new systems to take their places: the New State Report Card and rating system, the new and required teacher evaluation system, Smarter Balanced and so on. Just under new names and with new acronyms!
Life in educational leadership can feel a lot like a salmon swimming upstream - there are always new systems that box us into old and familiar ways of doing things, even though we know that trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity!
Also in the video Learning to Change - Changing to Learn, I loved the quote: "the death of education and the dawn of learning." Which is a perfect segue into the following two videos we saw today. In his TED talk, Sir Ken talked about the need for a revolution rather than the continuous drudgery of trying to fix something that is, in reality, broken. Again we are swimming against things which are larger than us - a shift in how society views and honors success. The idea that someone who aspires to be a fireman isn't as good as someone who wants to go to college. Image a world full of the academic types - a whole lot of thinking would happen but not a lot of doing! We need doers and thinkers and a whole lot in between.
Although there is much much more to be pondered upon from Sugata Mitra's research, the key thing that stuck out to me was the collaborative nature of learning and how much more was retained when it was student driven, interactive and collaborative! If you take Sir Ken's idea about a revolution, I think Sugata's SOLE concept is one worthy of some consideration.... talk about flipping the learning environment on it's head! Anther potential from Sugata's SOLE model is the idea of creating internationally minded learners. His learners were crossing cultural and linguistic barriers left and right!!