by Scott McLeod | May 9, 2009 | Leadership and Vision, Quotes, Reading |
Michael Port says…
The time has come. We cannot wait anymore. For years, we have hidden behind our own small thoughts or let ourselves be held back by other small thinking people who don’t believe in us. Worse still, we have been rejected as marginal, unrealistic, dreamers, idealists, maybe even delusional. Family, friends, colleagues, and others (not to mention our own selves) have tried to negate us, eliminate us, and silence us. We will not stand for it anymore. We say – bring it on. Our personal revolution from small thinking to big thinking is now. We will make public our aim to think big about our goals, our intentions, and, yes, our dreams.
There’s more. We will collaborate, cooperate, and join forces with other big thinkers to bring about the larger revolution our society needs if it is to survive.
You want to think big. I want to think big. Together, we will think even bigger. [The Think Big Manifesto, p. 34]
by Scott McLeod | Apr 23, 2009 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes |
From Mike Sansone:
I once asked a teacher what would happen if they treated their students like customers, with a design philosophy of customer experience in mind. The teacher was taken aback. She said the day she treats her students like customers is the day she would lose control of the room.
At that moment, I knew she was standing on the line of irrelevancy — and about to cross over. The reality is, she should have been looking for ways to share control rather than try to own it alone.
Hmmm… reminds me a bit of this Robert Fried quote.
In other news, student enrollments in more-personalized choice options such as charter schools, virtual schools, alternative schools, and home schooling continue to rise…
by Scott McLeod | Apr 20, 2009 | Leadership and Vision, Quotes |
Incumbents very seldom invent the future.
– Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, in Dinosaur at the Gate
by Scott McLeod | Mar 10, 2009 | 21st Century Skills, Assessment, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Learning and Teaching, News and Events, Our Changing World, Quotes, Research and Evaluation |
The President is calling:
I’m calling on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.
President Barack Obama, March 10, 2009
Alia iacta est. How will we answer the call?
by Scott McLeod | Mar 7, 2009 | 21st Century Skills, Blogging, CASTLE, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Learning and Teaching, News and Events, Our Changing World, Planning and Funding, Pre-Service Preparation, Professional Development, Quotes, Research and Evaluation, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
I've had a lot of fun guest blogging over at The Des Moines Register this week. For those of you who would like to have a single link that you can forward to others, you can use this web address:
by Scott McLeod | Feb 22, 2009 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes, Reading, Reviews |
I’ve had a lot of fun these past ten days posting quotes from Robert Fried’s The Game of School. I think Fried does a fabulous job of highlighting how schools as institutions have largely moved away from many of our desired ends for students and their learning. Not always, not for every kid, but mostly… And, as I hope you have seen for the past 10 days, he’s also eminently quotable.
Here’s a quick list of all of the posts:
I also have Fried’s books, The Passionate Learner and The Passionate Teacher, sitting on my shelf. I’m looking forward to digging into those as well.
For those of you who noted that you were inspired to go out and get a copy of The Game of School, I hope that you enjoy the book as much as I did. Happy reading!
I give this one 5 highlighters.
by Scott McLeod | Feb 22, 2009 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes |
Robert Fried says…
[I]f what we seek is a learning partnership with students, we cannot remain aloof from them or be seen as demanding their respect as a matter of right. Nor can we be viewed as seeking to “buy them off” by offering them a light workload in exchange for minimal compliance and decent behavior on their part. . . . We have to earn their respect . . . by being willing to roll up our sleeves as learners ourselves and to engage them in the pursuit of knowledge worth knowing, of skills worth gaining. [The Game of School, p. 117]
by Scott McLeod | Feb 21, 2009 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes |
Robert Fried says…
When student resistance to classroom learning is seen as typical and inevitable, and teachers console each other to “just hang on till June,” that . . . is being stuck.
The worst part of being stuck comes when you begin to think that what you are experiencing is the inevitable condition of being a teacher.
To be stuck as a teacher is . . . . dangerous to your spirit. You feel that your school is a place where authentic teaching and learning happen only rarely. It is the rare student who seems to genuinely appreciate what you have to offer, the rare class that responds well to the instruction you have meticulously planned for them. You consider yourself lucky if “most of the kids are paying attention, most of the time,” or if your latest lesson “seemed to go over okay.” You face the daily grind of instructional delivery, content coverage, student apathy, and grade consciousness. Your own learning streams seem to have dried up even as each new school year presents its complement of pedagogical challenges.
When you are stuck, it is not at all clear that there is anything you can do to resolve the situation you’re in. The horizons of your job look unchanging and unchangeable. . . . In such cases teachers stop seeing students, colleagues, and administrators as individuals capable of enhancing their effectiveness, but instead view them as “forces I have to contend with.”
As teachers, we pour incredible energy into our daily work. . . . Such an outpouring of energy and concern is tolerable as long as we are getting something back – so long as the flow of energy goes two ways, and we receive from our students and colleagues and, occasionally, parents as well, sufficient evidence that our efforts are having a real impact, that our caring is appreciated. But when the energy flow seems decidedly one-directional – outward and away – we begin to burn out. [The Game of School, pp. 153–155]
by Scott McLeod | Feb 20, 2009 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes |
Robert Fried says…
We [parents] become so confused, so conflicted, so fearful that unless we keep our children’s minds “on task,” aiming for the honor roll, the advanced placement courses, the grade-point average of life, we will damage their chances to access the next set of elite learning venues, be they the elementary school’s gifted-and-talented program, the high school’s honors classes, an Ivy League college, or a top-ranked graduate program. Such pressures can easily thwart our desire to see the children in our lives as happy, curious, confident, and enthusiastic learners. We see the contrast between how our children respond to the things they love to learn and how they resist or rebel against the boredom and inanity of much of their schoolwork. But we bite our tongues and (still confused) become complicit in the atrophy of our children’s learning spirit in furtherance of their academic careers. [The Game of School, pp. 80–81]
by Scott McLeod | Feb 19, 2009 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes |
Robert Fried says…
Like Jacob, the biblical youth who sold his patrimony to his brother Esau for the equivalent of a Big Mac, our youth are cajoled into giving up their independent spirit of learning, their spiritual heritage as self-motivated seekers, to get a test score burrito or a report card wrap.
The ultimate irony of this transference is that those few students who manage to retain their independent learning spirit . . . are likely to be better positioned to blossom academically and vocationally than those who pursue academic achievement through the Game. It is from that minority unencumbered by pseudo-goals that we get most of our inventors, entrepeneurs, artists, and scientists. What leads to success at higher levels of abstraction and study is precisely this ability to turn from the expected to pursue the intriguing . . . to awaken to the new theory or pattern amid the cacophony of conventional thinking. [The Game of School, p. 80]
