What is the purpose of education?
This seems like a simple question for each of us to answer, especially if we are in education. Over the past 20 years, I have been a teacher, curriculum director, consultant, assistant superintendent for instruction, and associate superintendent. I have facilitated a number of initiatives in a number of districts that have purported to have positive impact on students. More recently, I have worked on a number of projects spread across the globe that are also expected to have a dynamic impact on students. I felt like I knew the answer to the question of the purpose: to help each child reach his/her own full potential …to free them to create their own future… or something like that.
Can we talk?
For the past two days, I have had the great pleasure of sitting in a room with about 20 other educators thinking and having honest dialogue about the educational system. I recently read a piece by the president of NSDC in which she distinguished dialogue from other types of conversation (e.g., discussion, debate) by stating that dialogue is a conversation in which you learn and, therefore, it changes you. So, I feel it is appropriate to call this interaction over the past two days a dialogue in this sense of the word. I am changed because of it. I have discovered that even though I thought I was working toward the purpose of preparing students to create their own future, I have been thinking like, and therefore, talking like (or vice versa) I was preparing them for the future.
You say tomato…
Is this a simple matter of semantics? I have learned it is actually bedrock philosophy. I have listened to, read, been depressed by, and shared the sentiments of all the futurists. I have helped build curricula far and wide based on the idea of a skill set for the 21st century. All in the name of preparing students for the future which means presupposing what their future will be. It is liberating and intuitively healing to confess we don’t know their future and don’t have the right to decide or predict what it will be. It is even more exciting to understand that each one of them, each one of us, possesses the power to create the future! …and that is the power of strategy!
Shannon Buerk
Cambridge Senior Strategist
Reflections on Strategic Thinking Course January 12-14, 2009
This seems like a simple question for each of us to answer, especially if we are in education. Over the past 20 years, I have been a teacher, curriculum director, consultant, assistant superintendent for instruction, and associate superintendent. I have facilitated a number of initiatives in a number of districts that have purported to have positive impact on students. More recently, I have worked on a number of projects spread across the globe that are also expected to have a dynamic impact on students. I felt like I knew the answer to the question of the purpose: to help each child reach his/her own full potential …to free them to create their own future… or something like that.
Can we talk?
For the past two days, I have had the great pleasure of sitting in a room with about 20 other educators thinking and having honest dialogue about the educational system. I recently read a piece by the president of NSDC in which she distinguished dialogue from other types of conversation (e.g., discussion, debate) by stating that dialogue is a conversation in which you learn and, therefore, it changes you. So, I feel it is appropriate to call this interaction over the past two days a dialogue in this sense of the word. I am changed because of it. I have discovered that even though I thought I was working toward the purpose of preparing students to create their own future, I have been thinking like, and therefore, talking like (or vice versa) I was preparing them for the future.
You say tomato…
Is this a simple matter of semantics? I have learned it is actually bedrock philosophy. I have listened to, read, been depressed by, and shared the sentiments of all the futurists. I have helped build curricula far and wide based on the idea of a skill set for the 21st century. All in the name of preparing students for the future which means presupposing what their future will be. It is liberating and intuitively healing to confess we don’t know their future and don’t have the right to decide or predict what it will be. It is even more exciting to understand that each one of them, each one of us, possesses the power to create the future! …and that is the power of strategy!
Shannon Buerk
Cambridge Senior Strategist
Reflections on Strategic Thinking Course January 12-14, 2009
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment