When I think about our current education system, the first thing that comes to mind is the emphasis on fact collection and regurgitation. In schools today, the focus is mainly on getting students to remember dates and facts when in reality the focus needs to be shifted more towards comprehension and inquiry. To reimagine our education system is to shift the focus less on grades and tests and more towards creating an environment that supports curiosity, provides skills needed to succeed, and nurtures our natural thirst for knowledge. In the film ‘Most Likely to Succeed,’ the school High Tech High allows for students to take control of their own learning in the classroom. Instead of sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher rattle off information needed to pass a test, the student are given a topic for the year and work together with their teacher and their peers to produce a final project for their end of year exhibition. This approach allows students to dive deeper and gain a much greater understanding of their given topic while also helping them gain the soft skills, such as how to work as a team, that help one succeed in the work place. If you compare this to a public school classroom, there is much less freedom and time to allow students to truly understand the concept they are learning. Therefore, resulting in less retention and passion of their learning. Also, by working in a typical classroom block subject setting, students do not learn the soft skills and some can struggle to understand how to work through complex tasks which span many different subjects.
In order to reimagine education there would need to be a large shift in everyones educational expectations. When I think of a successful school, classroom, and student, I imagine a plethora of books, hours of homework and teachers lecturing while their students take diligent notes. I’m sure that I am not the only one to picture this when thinking of how to be successful in school. This mindset is what I believe to be the biggest obstacle educators face when trying to change pedagogy. It it difficult to understand that without the books, homework and block classes students can learn what is needed to get into University, which is the goal many parent have for their children. I feel that parents would expect to see proof that a reimagined approach to education will allow their children to be successful in their professional lives. However, as see in ‘Most Likely to Succeed,’ because their new way of teaching has not been around long enough to provide substantial evidence of longtime achievement, they struggled to believe that going to High Tech High was the right choice for their child. Therefore, I believe that the largest obstacle that educators face when trying to change pedagogy is the shift in mindset towards more inquiry based learning and exhibitions. Understanding that receiving a good grade on a test or assignment does not necessarily mean a comprehension of the knowledge.
The approach see in this film is something that both excites and concerns me. Seeing that education is hopefully moving away from tests and subject divided classes and more towards inquiry based learning in the age where knowledge is readily available online makes me excited to become a teacher and to teach the next generation of students how to navigate the world and to cultivate an environment where their natural curiousness can flourish. However, in regards to an elementary school classroom, I wonder how reimagining education would work. I believe that it is important to ensure that young children have the building blocks, in all subjects, before they can set off and become more independent in their learning. Therefore, providing an environment where young students are able to gain the simple knowledge while still being able to independently dive deeper into the topic they are learning could be a difficult task. However, I do believe it is possible Their inquiry based learning would just have to be in a smaller scale. For instance, if we are learning about the life cycle of a butterfly, there could be multiple stations laid out with different activities to explain the life cycle with books to support the topic and go more in depth into the topic of life cycles in general. This approach would work for younger students, yet, when students get older and start to use computers, it would become extremely important for them to be taught how to stay safe online. While the internet is an amazing resource, it can also be somewhere someone can become misinformed or can get themselves into an unsafe situation. Therefore, if this is the direction that education is headed, I believe that internet safety and literacy is something that need to be taught at a young age. While there are many things about this educational approach that could see daunting, I feel that it is a great reinvention of the system and something similar should to brought to classrooms in Canada.