Bob Greenberg has been videoing some amazing thinkers for his Brainwaves YouTube channel. People like Mitch Resnick, Alan Kay, Jerome Bruner, Nicholas Negroponte, Noam Chomsky, and Eric Mazur. I’m not exactly sure why Bob asked me too but I got to spend a few minutes with him at the recent ISTE conference in Philadelphia and of course was absolutely delighted for the opportunity…
The video is titled Transforming Schools. Happy viewing!
Great video! What are some of the things you do to create cognitive and emotional dissonance with school leaders regarding change? Maybe it could be a future blog post or a post that I have missed in the past. Thanks for doing what you do.
Lots of ways to hack at that. Here are some recent approaches on my blog:
http://bit.ly/1NrY62s
http://bit.ly/1zjtQjX
http://bit.ly/1lMnTJz
Great video as always, and I totally agree that nothing can happen without administrators being on board. But I have also seen many occasions when ‘top down’ initiatives have stalled because teachers do not buy in. How can we connect grass roots initiatives from teachers with administrators who ‘get it’–and let’s not forget schools of education as the third leg of change. Maybe if superintendents put out the word that they weren’t hiring any graduates who didn’t ‘get it’, Education faculties would put out graduates trained in the new approach who could form that energizing grass roots initiatives at school level that could take the resources provided by admin to start structural changes required…. Because right now we all talk the talk, and then graduates walk into the existing bureaucracy and learn that the ‘real world’ is about worksheets and keeping students quiet and compliant….
thanks !!
My first thought on all of your “How do we…” questions is: Step #1, stop evaluating and rewarding our schools based on multiple choice tests. The rhetoric has been “21 Century Skills” “Problem Solving” and “Higher Order Thinking Skills” for many years, yet the stick used to beat schools (there is no carrot) has been standardized tests. It is the elephant in the room, and needs to be mentioned as often as possible, to as many people as possible.