Friday, July 5, 2013

Education Is About Learning

Sir Ken Robinson is brilliant. I love the way he explains things--he's hilariously deadpan, but he gets you thinking about very important things. The TED Talk below is a great example. It's full of great ideas, challenging ideas. But at the heart of his message, there is a very simple truth:

Education is about learning.

If there is no learning going on, there is no education going on.

People can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning.

I highly encourage you to watch the whole talk, especially if you are a teacher, or if you have kids who are currently in school. Imagine what education would be like if schools would put the ideas he's dreaming up here into practice!


1 comment:

  1. Along with his entertaining sense of humor, he really had a lot of thought-provoking challenges for those of us in education. While I feel a bit overwhelmed by the deep hole of ineffectiveness our current educational structure has made, I think we have done a lot in recent years to shift the way we engage our students with inquiry-based, active, differentiated learning. The quote that resonated with me the most was the reminder that "children are natural learners". If we are not engaging them, it is our primary role to change what we are doing to engage them as best we can.
    I was also challenged by the connection he made to teaching an algorithm, rather than allowing creativity and unconventional ideas to play a role in the achievement of a skill or concept. As Christians, we know and embrace that each child is uniquely designed. If we expect all students to learn via the same path, that is contradictory to this very fundmental belief. While this is not new information in the world of education, I know I can be doing more in allowing creativity and outside-the-box thinking in helping my students achieve. I appreciate that he pointed out task versus achievement and the proper role of testing to diagnose and support learning, rather than being the focus.

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