What should they do?

 

Transcription:

1. The government should dedicate more time into their attempts to improve the existing educational system. They should think about the fact that without good teachers, it is almost impossible to have educated children.
2. Parents should be more involved in their children’s education. They can’t just let teachers educate their kids, it has to be a mutual task.
3. Students shouldn’t stop taking their education seriously.
4. Teachers should promote teaching as a good career choice, and attract quality people to the profession.
5. Principals should support teachers, and encourage them with rewards.
6. Businessman should not be involved in matters of education, unless they really do feel committed to education. 
   7. lawmakers should create laws that in the end will increase teacher’s status and respect. For example, raise the payment that teachers  receive.
    

Recruiting teachers.

 Transcription:

For this assignment, we were supposed to be principals at a school. We had to recruit teachers with a specific strategy. We needed to find a way of how to do it.
So we thought about the fact that it was too difficult to recruit good teachers without some kind of test. Sometimes theoretical tests are not enough to see if they are fulfilling the expectations. So we thought about a strategy that could be useful. Maybe, an arranged class where we could really see the teacher’s performance.

Travelling.

Earlier this morning, Cristofer said he was going to Tokyo, Japan, while Danae and Elliot didn’t know where they wanted to go yet. They want to visit around. Claudio and Camila are going to Valdivia together, and Ivo is going to Greece to record the vocals of his friend’s band. They all are flying to their destinations. Some of them said that they were travelling two years after graduation, however the others said that they were expecting to travel in two more years.

What was the old paradigm? What is the new paradigm proposed by the author?

Through the whole lecture, Sir Ken Robinson explains the idea of what is wrong with education nowadays. The old paradigm (the current paradigm) is the one where everything is evaluated with standardized tests. Where the whole system has a industrialized mentality treating students like they are workers in a factory.
But he proposes something new, a new paradigm.  We need to go in the exact opposite direction, promoting and protecting divergent thinking, making students see that there isn’t just one answer to a question.
It could be perceived as the evolution that is needed in the educational system,  going from a total structure to an entirely reformed sense of education.

Changing Paradigms.

Sir Ken Robinson is an educator and expert on issues related to creativity, innovation and the quality of education. In his lecture “Changing the paradigms” he clearly states that education as we know it is profoundly out of time.

Public education is being reformed around the world with two main purposes: economic and cultural. But, is it possible to have both of them with the inevitable presence of globalization?

It is not a simple task. We don’t want to lose our cultural identity, but we also don’t want to stay out of the big community that the world has turned into.

Then, there is the motto instilled to almost every student: If you work hard and do well, you will get into a good university, you will get a job, and everything will be solved. But that is not a guarantee. It is not believable anymore. And it is partly because the current system was designed for a different period of time. In a time where everything was believed to have a reason and meaning. You needed to have theoretical and academic knowledge in order to be part of the industrialization. That was one hundred and sixty years ago.

We still can see how the educational system is connected with the interests of industrialization. Ringing bells that indicate when to start and when to finish your work, age groups that in the end are just a date of manufacture.

Another important topic is the modern epidemic of ADHD. As the lecturer said, this affirmation is “as misplaced as fictitious”. The system has certain “expectations” of how students should be, and act. They are expected to be quiet, and to imbibe any information given to them. Despite this, there are students that cannot learn with this method. These are the ones that are not fulfilling those expectations. Some of them, are the ones who suffer of ADHD. This is a subjective assumption, but yet, many of them are being medicated. Medicated to finally achieve the expectations of the system. But, what is the point of sedating the minds of hundreds of children, instead of encourage them? That is why we have to protect the Divergent thinking.

Some people misinterprets Divergent thinking with Creativity. Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for creativity. It is a way of seeing multiple answers to one question. We all have this capacity, but it usually deteriorates as we get older. What we need is to preserve and to cultivate that ability. Sadly, we are doing the exact opposite with the current educational system.

When the lecture is about to finish, Sir Ken Robinson clearly tells us that the key to a better education is to release our students from the futile idea of what is academic and non-academic, that great learning happens in groups.

This lecture is an eye opener. It gives us hints about education that we, as future teachers, need to develop into something bigger. These are just the foundations that, if are truly understood, could lead to a new generation of  people that could properly called themselves “educated”.