“Our job is not to teach subjects, but to teach students.” -- Sir Ken Robinson
The highlight of the CUE conference in Palm Springs for me was the keynote address delivered by Sir Ken Robinson on the morning of March 15, 2013. If you don’t know who he use, just look him up on YouTube and you will find many presentations.
Growing up in Los Angeles I always felt indifferent to movie stars. I saw them, but never had that crazy feeling you see in fans who flail wildly in the stands next to red carpet premieres and awards shows...until Sir Ken stepped out on stage. I felt like I was in the presence of someone very special. So hero worship aside, he delivered a keynote that was funny and poignant.
Sir Ken began with some perspective on humanity and then got to the heart of what he wanted all of us to think about. Schools have to bring back creativity and learn how to let kids be creative again. “Human talents are very much like natural resources in the ground…and they don’t always manifest themselves without the right conditions.” And the right conditions are not an obsessive focus on standards. For over a decade we have been ticking down those blasted checklists of stuff to teach and have rushed past opportunities for great conversations and creativity. With the new Common Core, we are about to make the same mistake again if we don’t change our thinking. We should be raising the standard of teaching and the pedagogy that will support thinking and creating, not rushing to make everything the same in all grades. Sir Ken points out, “People confuse raising standards with standardization, and they tend to focus on certain standards while neglecting others.”
In an attempt to address the hole created in the obsessive focus on language arts and math test scores, thanks to NCLB, reformers are glomming onto STEM curriculum. To which Sir Ken says, “STEM is not enough!” Once again a complex problem is trying to be solved by a ready-made package of curriculum. As I have mentioned before, the factory mindset is insidious. Too many people are just trying to switch out conveyer belts or looping them through different doors before kids leave the factory. The factory is the problem!
Laying out his three principles for our species, Sir Ken makes the points 1) Humans are diverse, 2) Human beings are inherently creative, 3) Human lives aren’t linear; they are organic. He goes on to explain that we need schools to embrace these principles because we need innovators. People who can create and adapt. Businesses are saying “adaptability is needed at the core of corporate America – but going through our schools closes that skill.” That’s because we are trapped in the compliance model. Come to class on time, shut up, sit down, absorb, and regurgitate. Not exactly the environment for divergent thinking.
Creativity is the opposite of standardization. Sir Ken went on to explain what he means by creativity. “...by creative we mean contributions that can’t be predicted by standards, but can yet be untapped by some modicum of freedom to create our own standards. Nothing seemed less probable…when I was a child…that I would have the life I have…it wasn’t a plan. It was an evolution.” So the question becomes are we going to permit and encourage students to evolve or are we going to continue answering their questions for them by tracking kids into ability groups, preventing them from moving out of a label, containing their interests by forcing compliance to a set of standards? In essence, everything education does right now is the opposite of creativity. For heaven’s sake, we have schools that assign letter grades to student art! Really? We are allowing inspector 32 on the educational assembly line to assign a ranking to a work of creativity? I would assume Picasso would have failed his art class in today's school.
“Every life is a conversation between your talents and your experiences,” says Sir Ken. Learning is organic. It doesn’t proceed in a smooth pattern from point A to point B. It is more like a tide. It ebbs and flows. Our experience tells us that. And yet schools are stuck in the factory model. “The educational system is based on our compliance.” We look for “what they can’t do, not on what they can do.” Sir Ken asks, “How would it transform teaching if we flipped this philosophy?”
Sir Ken offered some recommendations for how to change education. “We have to get away from standardizing to personalizing. We have to get away from narrowing to embracing the diversity.” Individualize schedules. Facilitate learning, don’t direct it. Recognize that kids learn at different rates. Find ways to embrace and nurture the unlimited variety of diverse talents. Broaden student experiences. Leverage the power of technology to help make this happen.
He closed with this idea. “George Orwell said, ‘Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.’ Who will win if education cannot evolve?” We can’t sit around waiting for bureaucracies to figure this out. We have to change what we do right now. Every teacher in America can start changing and be part of the revolution tomorrow. There is no need to wait for permission.
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