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Oct 10
2010
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You, me, and we versus “they” in attempts to improve education.Posted by: Dave Moursund Tagged in: Education Reform
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Click here to learn about Dave Moursund's free book on science and technology education for teaches and parents of K-8 children.
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Here is one of my most favorite quotes:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed; it's the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead; American Cultural Anthropologist; 1901–1978.)
As I think about trying to improve our informal and formal education system, I often think of this quote. In a typical day, what do I do to help improve our educational system? What do you do? What do we and the people we frequently interact with do together? And, why don’t “they” (government, business, and others) do something?
It is very easy to blame the shortcomings of our educational system on others. Education would be better if “they” would set higher standards, make students work harder, extend the length of the school day and year, pay teachers more, have merit pay for “good” teachers and fire “bad” teachers, make students do more homework, etc., etc., etc. Almost everyone has a surefire solution. Now, if only the “they” of the world would take our advice, no matter how ill informed and ill advised it might be.
So, back to what I as an individual can do, and what you as an individual can do? Think of yourself as a lifetime teacher and a lifetime learner. You are learning all the time. Whenever you communicate with someone else, you are serving in the role of teacher helping that person to gain a better informal and/or formal education.
With that in mind, think about your conscious efforts each day to improve your own informal and formal education, and your achievements in that regard. Then think about what you do to share your learning experiences and what you do to specifically help others to improve their insights into hard problems such as improving education and dealing with issues such as the world’s sustainability. Each of can make a difference with ourselves and the people we communicate with. Collectively, “we” can change the world of education. I will do my share, and I hope that you will do your share.
What You Can Do
You know that the message sent is not necessarily the message received. You, for example, have “constructed” a personal meaning to my message given above. My overall intent is to provide you with some information and ideas that you will act upon in a manner that leads to improving our informal and formal education system.
So, pause for a few seconds and think about the meaning you have constructed from my message and some possible action that you might take based on the meaning you have constructed. What occurs to you that you, personally, will try out in your quest to improve our education system?
As a personal example, when I talk to people that I meet in my everyday life, I often ask them what they think about their personal education and the education of their children and grandchildren. I then steer the conversation into possible ways to improve education. If they say something that I think is really a wrong idea, I attempt to enlighten them.
Final Remarks
Spend a bit of time reflecting on what you have just read. How does the information fit in with your current knowledge, beliefs, and activities? How can you make use of the information to help improve our informal and formal educational systems? Who do you know that might benefit from reading the IAE Blog entry?
If the IAE blog entries are useful to you, then consider signing up for a Free Subscription. (See the menu on the left side of the page.) You will automatically receive email about new postings to the blog. Typically, there are about three new postings per week.
Links to Related IAE Documents
All educators are engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Empowering Learners and Teachers.
Improving Education: A Political Agenda. IAE Newsletter - Issue 29, November 2009.
In some sense, all teachers are ethnographers.
Our educational system should strive toward heterogeneity rather than homogenuity.
Rising above the gathering storm, revisited: The rapidly approaching Category 5 storm.
Translating brain science research results into effective teaching.
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written by Dave Moursund, October 12, 2010
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written by Dave Moursund, November 18, 2010
Nisbett, Richard E. (November 2010). Think big, bigger … and smaller. Educational Leadership. Retrieved 1/28/2011 from http://www.ascd.org/publicatio...ller.aspx.
The focus in the article is on thinking smaller and locally in efforts to improve our educational system. Quoting the article:
I am a social psychologist, and two important general principles in my field are (1) some big-seeming interventions have little or no effect, and (2) some small-seeming interventions have significant effects. Both of these principles are confirmed over and over again in the field of education.
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I started out by saying that big interventions don't always have big effects, but small interventions can have big effects. That's decidedly true for small interventions that address ethnic achievement gaps.
For example, social psychologist Carol Dweck found, not surprisingly, that students who believe that ability is a matter of hard work get higher grades than students who believe that ability is fixed from birth. Dweck and her colleagues taught a group of low-income, minority students that learning forms neural connections and changes the brain and that students are in charge of this process. Dweck reports that some tough junior high school boys were actually reduced to tears by the news that their intelligence was substantially under their own control. Students exposed to the intervention worked harder, according to their teachers, and got higher grades than students in a control condition. The intervention was more effective for students who initially believed that intelligence was a matter of genes than it was for students who already tended to believe it was a matter of hard work (Dweck, 2007).
Aronson, Fried, and Good (2002) performed similar experiments, with dramatic results. They conducted one study with low-income, minority students in Texas who were entering junior high school. The intervention was short and simple. For the first year of junior high, each student was assigned a college-student mentor who helped him or her explore a variety of issues related to school adjustment.
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written by Dave Moursund, November 18, 2010
Pilloton, Emily (July 2010): Teaching design for change. Retrieved 11/17 2010 from http://www.ted.com/talks/emily...change.htm
This video provides a good example of what a small number of dedicated people can do to change education. Quoting from the Website:
Designer Emily Pilloton moved to rural Bertie County, in North Carolina, to engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation. She's teaching a design-build class called Studio H that engages high schoolers' minds and bodies while bringing smart design and new opportunities to the poorest county in the state.
I found the video to be inspiring.
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Two things occurred to me:
1. If the list were easily available to me when I was using my computer in some reading and writing task, I could add links and brief note whenever I encountered a relevant idea or information source.
2. Perhaps some other people might benefit from seeing my list and might even be enticed into helping accomplish some of the tasks on the list. (Think of Tom Sawyer and whitewashing a fence.)
The result was that I created the file://localhost/file http/::iae-pedia.org
It turns out that the list is useful to a variety of people and that it is getting quite a few hits. One of my colleagues told me his students were finding the list helpful as they thought about possible topics for term projects, master’s degree writing projects, and doctor’s degree research projects. Right on! (Or, should I say, “write on”?)