Source: Newsweek
Robinson points out that our education systems are based on three principles which are the opposite of how human life flourishes:
Apart from that, they’re great. The first one is conformity. Our systems are becoming more and more standardized; whereas the great pulse of human life is diversity. We are here in all of our varied differences, we are centers of unique talents and possibilities, each of us in every child. The second is our education systems are based on compliance, more and more. Whereas the energy of human life is creativity and innovation. It’s why in the United States — kids come from college and they cannot innovate anymore. It’s kind of been educated out of them. But the third is this: Human life is organic. We create our lives, our education systems are based on a principal of linearity. I would bet very few of are you of living the life now that you anticipated you would be living when you left school; is that correct? I mean, we submit to a fiction here that there comes a point in your life where you have to write your resume. And we set it all out in some linear narrative, you put headings in, certain things in bold you pick them out to try to make your life look as if it’s all run along some very well-planned strategy here to take you from your childhood to your present position of eminence. But of course it’s not at all like that. You do that because the last thing that you want to do is to convey in your resume the actual chaos that you’ve been living through. T13:33
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The biggest lesson from the flipped classroom may not be about math – Casting Out Nines – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
I started out using the One Minute Manager approach over 30 years ago, have experimented with a wide assortment time management systems and most recently have been using David Allen’s Get Things Done (GTD) time management method, and I can still honestly say I find time management to be one of my biggest challenges. So when Robert Talbert identified time management and not Math as being the biggest challenge for his student in his flipped classroom I realized that this is just one more life skill that we are ignoring when we strive to cover the content of the curriculum.
The timing of this blog post couldn’t have been better. Over the past few years my two teen aged boys have been taking on more complicated or sophisticated projects and this fall they are finding that they need to be better organized if they are to fit everything into their days. My older son Levi commented on the challenge of working at becoming a professional downhill bike racer and an extreme athlete while trying to fit in his final year of high school studies. My younger son has always felt the pressure of large projects so we started working with them on building To Do lists, categorizing and prioritizing their school and training responsibilities. This may be one of the most important skills that they will learn.
Talbert suggests that:
a good co-requisite for any flipped class is a mini-workshop on GTD principles, to train students how to think in terms of projects, contexts, and tasks and to free their minds up to work well.
Perhaps he isn’t going far enough. Training students how to manage projects, tasks, and free up their minds to work well is fundamental to self regulated learning which is at the core of life long learning and personal growth.
Sharing the fundamentals of the GTD approach with my boys has just moved to the top of my To Do list. Shouldn’t this be on the top of all parents and educators lists?
