Educate For Problem-Solving, Not Factories - Forbes
Educate For Problem-Solving, Not Factories - Forbes
Quick show of hands: How many of you actually enjoy doing homework? That’s more or less what I figured. (I don’t see anyone with their hands raised.)
A 1948 U.S. survey showed that the typical high school student spent three to four hours on homework … per week. But as America raced into space during the 1950s, a pro-homework movement took off, in part, due to fears that students weren’t keeping up with their counterparts in the Soviet Union.
The stacks of homework have continued to climb, by more than 50 percent since 1981, but the additional problem sets don’t seem to be helping much. A new research paper suggests that if you can do basic subtraction, you’re probably a better mathematician than the majority of U.S. community college students. That’s discouraging, especially in light of lagging education statistics. Perhaps more troubling is that the extra homework load we subject our students to—and the adolescent academic stress associated with it—not only puts a damper on the after-school fun factor, but may also hurt their intellectual development.
So what now? The best answers to real-word problems don’t come from the back of a textbook. Let’s try something different.
No Homework; No One Falls Behind
New York Times contributor and solution journalist David Bornstein told the story of Ibrahim Sobhan in his hit book, “How to Change the World.” Sobhan is an Ashoka Fellow from Bangladesh who flipped the traditional classroom model on its head back in the 1980s, improving the quality of rural schools where dropout rates were as high as 70 percent and the student-teacher ratio was an unforgiving 60-to-1.
“To provide better instruction, Sobhan placed his students in ten-member groups and assigned quick learners in each group responsibility for co-teaching their peers,” wrote Bornstein. “He introduced a program in which young girls taught their mothers to read. And he found that he could cut the dropout rate dramatically by doing away with homework and incorporating income-generating activities such as fish cultivation and livestock rearing in the school curriculum.”
Sobhan’s new-look classroom, one that placed greater value in exploration instead of results, not only taught students real-world skills, but gave them the opportunity to be creative and confident problem solvers. Bornstein, in his search for social excellence, made another note of the payoffs earned when children are put in charge of their own learning, this time citing the work of Ashoka Fellow Anil Chitrakar:
“Another social entrepreneur, Anil Chitrakar, an engineer from Nepal, had devised a scalable program to train 11- to 14-year-old children in rural areas to maintain solar electric pumps. He soon found that the youngsters were not only quick studies, they were eager to help older villagers adopt new technologies to improve rural life. He created a network of technology and environmental camps to show them how.”
Don’t Let School Interfere with Your Education
Only 69 percent of U.S. students who start high school finish four years later and an average of 7,200 high schoolers drop out every day—that’s 1.3 million youth in the workforce without a high school diploma. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Administrators at Clintondale High School near Detroit are taking a page out of Sobhan’s overcrowded classroom in Bangladesh and changing the paradigm for learning. The school’s students are encouraged to keep their gadgets, once considered classroom distractions, and their enthusiasm for learning fully charged.
With the World Wide Web at their fingertips, Clintondale students are the masters of their universes: they learn lessons once taught in class at their own pace, in their own ways, and in the comfort of their own homes. “Homework” is completed at school and complemented by a rich, hands-on learning environment; “schoolwork,” like running through a lesson plan, can be digested over the Web through a series of short video lectures. Teachers get more one-on-one time with students to revisit concepts and provide instant feedback. That allows parents to focus on parenting in the evenings, instead of having to fill in as adjunct professors—tripping over trigonometry (something many parents haven’t seen in decades) or staying up late to proofread papers.
Clintondale’s open approach has worked. Before the flip, administrators would see more than 700 discipline cases in a single semester. More than 50 percent of freshman failed English and 44 percent failed math. After the flip, discipline cases at Clintondale dropped to 249 per semester; 19 percent of freshman failed English and 13 percent of freshman failed math.
“It’s the teacher’s job to point young minds towards the right kinds of questions,” suggests Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University.
“The teacher doesn’t need to give any answers, the answers are everywhere. And we know now from years of measurements, that learners who find the answers for themselves, retain it better than if they’re told the answer.”
This isn’t to say that teaching students to read, write and do arithmetic isn’t important—it is. But we ought to give children a little more credit for the things they bring to the classroom table, including genius-level divergent thinking.
Stop educating for factories
Because Wall Street has hollowed out industrial America, we no longer have factories to fill—not like we used to, anyway. Just take a look at Clintondale’s Detroit. It was once considered among the greatest cities in the world, an industrial powerhouse, but is now described as “a decrepit, often surreal landscape of urban decline.”
Maybe it’s time we look at what we’re educating our kids for, because the so-called “skills gap” is really a gap in education. Here’s Seth Godin, the forward-thinking entrepreneur in this age of information, on how rote memorization and standardization is doing a disservice to our future leaders and our global economy.
“If you look at the fact that we process twenty or thirty kids at a time, in a batch just like a factory, if you look at the fact that if you fail third grade, what do you do? We hold you back, and we reprocess you—all matching the way a factory works. We built it on purpose, and it was really useful for its function. But we don’t have a shortage of factory workers any more.”
Administrators don’t necessarily have to flip their classrooms to graduate confident and socially conscious students—see this cohort of changemaker schools who are making difference in their own ways—but they must consider the power of new learning models to unlock the potential of youth. Education must create value by teaching people to make a living as problem-solvers and purposeful entrepreneurs.
Let’s stop force-feeding students answers in 40-minute blocks. Let’s stop stifling creativity and innovation. If we want to make the grade, we must open our children’s eyes, ears, hearts and minds to a future of lifelong learning. The sooner the better.
Our take on all of the above - read how moladi see the scenario - Job creation starts at school
Keywords - Job creation, education, problem solving, entrepreneurship, Africa, artisan, classroom, creation, education, housing, job, mathematics, moladi, pupils, schools, skill's, south, teachers, trades, unemployment, stimulate the mind, forbes, change
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| Job Creation - moladi |
Quick show of hands: How many of you actually enjoy doing homework? That’s more or less what I figured. (I don’t see anyone with their hands raised.)
A 1948 U.S. survey showed that the typical high school student spent three to four hours on homework … per week. But as America raced into space during the 1950s, a pro-homework movement took off, in part, due to fears that students weren’t keeping up with their counterparts in the Soviet Union.
The stacks of homework have continued to climb, by more than 50 percent since 1981, but the additional problem sets don’t seem to be helping much. A new research paper suggests that if you can do basic subtraction, you’re probably a better mathematician than the majority of U.S. community college students. That’s discouraging, especially in light of lagging education statistics. Perhaps more troubling is that the extra homework load we subject our students to—and the adolescent academic stress associated with it—not only puts a damper on the after-school fun factor, but may also hurt their intellectual development.
So what now? The best answers to real-word problems don’t come from the back of a textbook. Let’s try something different.
No Homework; No One Falls Behind
New York Times contributor and solution journalist David Bornstein told the story of Ibrahim Sobhan in his hit book, “How to Change the World.” Sobhan is an Ashoka Fellow from Bangladesh who flipped the traditional classroom model on its head back in the 1980s, improving the quality of rural schools where dropout rates were as high as 70 percent and the student-teacher ratio was an unforgiving 60-to-1.
“To provide better instruction, Sobhan placed his students in ten-member groups and assigned quick learners in each group responsibility for co-teaching their peers,” wrote Bornstein. “He introduced a program in which young girls taught their mothers to read. And he found that he could cut the dropout rate dramatically by doing away with homework and incorporating income-generating activities such as fish cultivation and livestock rearing in the school curriculum.”
Sobhan’s new-look classroom, one that placed greater value in exploration instead of results, not only taught students real-world skills, but gave them the opportunity to be creative and confident problem solvers. Bornstein, in his search for social excellence, made another note of the payoffs earned when children are put in charge of their own learning, this time citing the work of Ashoka Fellow Anil Chitrakar:
“Another social entrepreneur, Anil Chitrakar, an engineer from Nepal, had devised a scalable program to train 11- to 14-year-old children in rural areas to maintain solar electric pumps. He soon found that the youngsters were not only quick studies, they were eager to help older villagers adopt new technologies to improve rural life. He created a network of technology and environmental camps to show them how.”
Don’t Let School Interfere with Your Education
Only 69 percent of U.S. students who start high school finish four years later and an average of 7,200 high schoolers drop out every day—that’s 1.3 million youth in the workforce without a high school diploma. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Administrators at Clintondale High School near Detroit are taking a page out of Sobhan’s overcrowded classroom in Bangladesh and changing the paradigm for learning. The school’s students are encouraged to keep their gadgets, once considered classroom distractions, and their enthusiasm for learning fully charged.
With the World Wide Web at their fingertips, Clintondale students are the masters of their universes: they learn lessons once taught in class at their own pace, in their own ways, and in the comfort of their own homes. “Homework” is completed at school and complemented by a rich, hands-on learning environment; “schoolwork,” like running through a lesson plan, can be digested over the Web through a series of short video lectures. Teachers get more one-on-one time with students to revisit concepts and provide instant feedback. That allows parents to focus on parenting in the evenings, instead of having to fill in as adjunct professors—tripping over trigonometry (something many parents haven’t seen in decades) or staying up late to proofread papers.
Clintondale’s open approach has worked. Before the flip, administrators would see more than 700 discipline cases in a single semester. More than 50 percent of freshman failed English and 44 percent failed math. After the flip, discipline cases at Clintondale dropped to 249 per semester; 19 percent of freshman failed English and 13 percent of freshman failed math.
“It’s the teacher’s job to point young minds towards the right kinds of questions,” suggests Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University.
“The teacher doesn’t need to give any answers, the answers are everywhere. And we know now from years of measurements, that learners who find the answers for themselves, retain it better than if they’re told the answer.”
This isn’t to say that teaching students to read, write and do arithmetic isn’t important—it is. But we ought to give children a little more credit for the things they bring to the classroom table, including genius-level divergent thinking.
Stop educating for factories
Because Wall Street has hollowed out industrial America, we no longer have factories to fill—not like we used to, anyway. Just take a look at Clintondale’s Detroit. It was once considered among the greatest cities in the world, an industrial powerhouse, but is now described as “a decrepit, often surreal landscape of urban decline.”
Maybe it’s time we look at what we’re educating our kids for, because the so-called “skills gap” is really a gap in education. Here’s Seth Godin, the forward-thinking entrepreneur in this age of information, on how rote memorization and standardization is doing a disservice to our future leaders and our global economy.
“If you look at the fact that we process twenty or thirty kids at a time, in a batch just like a factory, if you look at the fact that if you fail third grade, what do you do? We hold you back, and we reprocess you—all matching the way a factory works. We built it on purpose, and it was really useful for its function. But we don’t have a shortage of factory workers any more.”
Administrators don’t necessarily have to flip their classrooms to graduate confident and socially conscious students—see this cohort of changemaker schools who are making difference in their own ways—but they must consider the power of new learning models to unlock the potential of youth. Education must create value by teaching people to make a living as problem-solvers and purposeful entrepreneurs.
Let’s stop force-feeding students answers in 40-minute blocks. Let’s stop stifling creativity and innovation. If we want to make the grade, we must open our children’s eyes, ears, hearts and minds to a future of lifelong learning. The sooner the better.
Our take on all of the above - read how moladi see the scenario - Job creation starts at school
Keywords - Job creation, education, problem solving, entrepreneurship, Africa, artisan, classroom, creation, education, housing, job, mathematics, moladi, pupils, schools, skill's, south, teachers, trades, unemployment, stimulate the mind, forbes, change
