Rethinking the purpose of teaching

The opinion piece by Harvard Professor David Edwards published in Wired focuses on how the fundamental purpose of schooling and education needs to be given some serious thought - a makeover in light of where the world is headed. The author highlights the important goal of teaching children to learn how to discover.

One thing that we do know is that children will learn the art of inquiry and discovery only when their teachers practice a pedagogy that supports these goals in the classroom; and when teachers can model for their students the processes of discovery and the accompanying joy and excitement it brings. Yet state governments in the US are even now fundamentally re--purposing teacher preparation programs to become even more academically driven with an ethos of high stakes testing taking over the ethos of discovery and critical thinking. When teacher education itself becomes so test driven and score oriented, then teacher educators also tend to teach to the test. It is more than likely that their students will graduate from teacher education programs, enter schools and perpetuate the cycle of teaching to the test.

Click here to read David Edward's piece:

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/on-learning-by-doing/





Schooling in Finland and America

In this oped, Passi Sahlberg highlights three factors that contribute toward the high quality of Finnish schools, and that are absent in the current system of schooling in America: educational equity, the nature of teaching responsibilities, and the presence of physical movement and play for students during school hours:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/06/opinion/sahlberg-finland-education/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Sahlberg is a former director-general in the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, and has written a book detailing the system of education and schooling in Finland titled: Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?