The Polliwog Journal

Thank you Ted Nellen for the link to this video, “Learning to Change-Changing to Learn,” which is further validation of everything I believe about the future of schools. I am so proud to be a CyberEnglish teacher, which I owe again to Ted and his vision.

We’re a revolutionary classroom, and yet, we are not anywhere near where we could be or should be. And our classroom only engages one quarter of our students for one year.

Nonetheless, I am excited to be a teacher in the days when people are actually talking about radical and true change in schools. We think we’re past the one room school, but we’re not. We’ve got big box schools instead. One building, isolated from the world, isolated from community, teachers isolated from each other, with books that are prescriptive, with curriculum that is so standardized that it stifles creativity.

Arrggghhh! No wonder kids are bored. School is such a drudge compared to their outside-of-school life.

The teachers and leaders in this video say some really smart things that every educator should not only be listening to but also finding ways to make real changes for the students in their own schools:

• We have to develop a narrative that sustains 21st century learning.
• Kids are very rich content developers today through their social networking sites; they’re big communicators through email, instant messaging, and text messaging, and yet all of those things are banned from their schools.
• [Schools of the future are about] relationship, community, connectivity and access.
• The “nearly now” [Facebook, Twitter, etc.] is a great place for learning–allowing time to reflect, retract, research.
• We’ve got a classroom system when we could have a community system.
• Skills of future call on [students'] artistic abilities, abilities of synthesis, ability to understand context, to work in teams, their multidisciplinary, multicultural, multilingual abilities.

And my favorite:

• “Now we’re looking at a whole different range of schools that are producing ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children who care about stuff like their culture and to build schools like that is a whole other challenge . . . . it’s a very exiting time for learning. It’s the death of education but the dawn of learning.”

The idea of “ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children who care about stuff” is a heartbreaking idea. It’s heartbreaking because this is how kids are born. This is who they are as children before they go to school.

It is a moral imperative for us to make our schools worthy of them.