I am a daily reader of Seth Godin’s blog.
This is a reflection on today’s post:
This makes me think about our structure of schools. When we use the telling model, the idea of content delivery, where teachers deliver content to students, we have children who don’t care. They don’t see the relevance. In high school, the relevance can become “I need to learn this for a test to get a good mark and get into university/college”. But if that doesn’t resonate, disengagement is a logical conclusion if the content is not otherwise relevant.
It’s the case with Professional Learning as well. If educators can’t see the relevance, or they see professional development as something delivered by the system, disengagement is a logical conclusion.
Which is why I hang my hat on ownership of learning for all. How can we use inquiry – asking good and different questions – to own our learning? How do we empower teachers and students to do the learning relevant to them, to meet their personal learning goals?
If motivation is a key to learning, how do we look beyond a very narrow form of motivation to an array of personal motivations? How can we ensure that a narrow set of values – motivations that worked in the past – are not assumed to be the motivations of all youth today? How do we create a system that allows for many different motivations?
How do we encourage new questions, instead of crushing them? How can we value new questions in a way that allows them to lead to new answers?
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