Hey, this is just a scribbled notes, skeletal version of Chris' fine, energizing, coherent version of what he wants schools to transform into. Hope this sketch kindles your interest in going to the YouTube original version because he's worth "seeing" in person!
CHRIS LEHMANN
My TEDxNYED Talk - Creating School 2.0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FEMCyHYTyQ&feature=player_embedded#!
http://goo.gl/j3tk
3/06/10
He wants his kids to have amazing schools, to be learners. "Let's build a place where we can come together and learn."
He wants them to love the acquisition of knowledge...but what about loving the acquisition/execution of accomplishment!!
He wants them to have a day like 'today' where they walk out of the talk and say "...my head hurts because it's so full of ideas." [Now I know what to say after working on CocoLoco and my head is 'spinning' from all the thought surges.]
Data Driven Decisions: - hits hard at testing as the testing norm, end all be all. *** "Standardized testing is cheap and easy, but it's not good."
Building Caring Institutions - We Teach Kids, Not subjects - Language counts - say, "I teach kids English. "9:00? Kids need adults - help them make sense of the world.
Should be Inquiry Driven: schools should be places of great inquiry; ask rich, powerful questions then seek the answers. What are the questions we can ask together? Go from guided inquiry to open inquiry.
Student Centered - about their work, about their learning. 10:10 Teachers as mentors. Many teachers have a moment when they realize that at least for one child They ARE the adult that matters.
Community-based schools - We can learn from many.
" If you're reading a book in class by a living author and you don't call the publisher and say hey, are they willing to do a half-hour Skype call, you're doing a disservice... Bring your classroom into the world, and the world into the classroom."
Schools should be Collaborative, because synthesis works, because my idea reacts with your idea and is changed. When we allow ourselves to react with the minds of others we grow. We've got to let kids and adults work together. This is our office table...we all hang out there.
In all our spaces we learn together. Schools should be places of passion; pix of kids working on a piece of sheet metal: "Lonny Mercado is cutting sheet metal to build the first ever flow-process biodiesel generator. because a caring teacher who had an idea and 30 kids worked on something that had never been done before and now they have a patent pending on it."
And here's where it gets really cool, this is seven times more efficient what they built than the standard biodiesel is built. They gave it away to Creative Commons. If you're going to use it for a non-profit purpose, they gave it away. We know of a village in Guatemala and a village in Ecuador that took what our kids have built and went from buying the diesel for the electricity to power their schools to actually powering their schools electricity simply by the crops that they had and the work of our kids, and what the people in that village, the students in that village, built."
This happens when we dare to ask the question, what if high school wasn't just preparation for real life, what if we honored the work of the kids, and said, high school IS real life. "
Integrated: fewer classes instead of 8 classes a day. so kids have time to get down to work. He visited a philadelphia traditional high school - "By the end of the day not only could I not remember what the actual stuff that was taught in first period, I didn't remember what class I had. We've gotta make the day make more sense. ...we need longer classes that meet fewer times, so kids have the time to play with ideas, so they have time to get down to work, then wecan see, we can build those essential questions we can build those themes, so that when you're studying genetics in a biochemistry lab, and you're looking at how you become who you are, you're reading Hamlet and you're asking how does he become what he is." kids in chemistry illustrate in art class what titanium represents, etc. classes connected ot one another throughout the day.
Meta-Cognitive - we need to think about thinking.
Anything you teach is not as important as helping kids learn to think for themselves!
Technology these days has to be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary and invisible; it's got to be everywhere, it's gotta be important and then we've just got to stop talking about it so much and just use it as a tool."
16:16 Says Neil Postman said that with the Gutenberg printing press, you didn't have the Europe you always had plus books, you had a whole new Europe because it was a truly transformative technology, yet in so many schools in America and all over the place, we don't have whole new schools, we have the schools we've always had plus some technology and what we need are whole new schools. The technology should allow us to redefine everything, and what it really allows us to do is create, research, collaborate, present, and network in all kinds of new ways. Yes, schools have done some of these things for a very long time, but now we can do them like never before."
How do we change the world? - 18:00 Let's be humbled by all we do not know and skeptical of those who are not.
Keep Asking Questions - and don't settle for easy answers.
18:30 - And for the journalists in the room, let's go after the people who give us easy answers.What's going on in American education right now is a travesty, and we settle for the easy answers and we settle for the sound bite, without asking the harder questions. Let's ask the hard questions, and let's demand the answers.
Continue the Conversation - dream big in every community.
Go back to where you live, talk to kids, teachers, ask state reps, ask how can we dream about what we want our schools to be. ... Kids know something is wrong, teachers know something is wrong, parents know something is wrong. We've got to
Empower the Kids." they deserve a voice in their own education, and we need to be learners ourselves. and we need to be willing to be transformed.
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