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Great point! The Ken Robinson video resonated for me and prompted me to think more into the advent of No Child Left Behind, because in reality children are being left behind. Teachers are teaching to a test and to some extent assessing for the sake of assessing. It’s almost as if teachers realize they are required to do some form of assessment, but once the assessment has concluded, they do nothing with the data collected from students. It’s as if it ‘s a check mark on a long list of requirements.

I’m appreciative that you shared your sentiments on “Not all students are like me”, which is awesome to recognize, because SOLs is the same test for every student and your comment made me think that if administration, policy makers or teachers realized that notion would we be administering the same assessment (SOLs) for every student? Every student is unique in the way they learn and not everything is multiple choice or a given, which is where I think the waters get muddy, especially when students are transitioning into college.

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Personally, this TED talk drove me crazy. Ken Robinson seemed to be grand-standing, and more interested in how the audience reacted to his cheap jokes than offering tangible solutions. The summary above does a great job of outlining Robinson’s key points. Robinson’s perspective on why the American education system is failing are valid, but are similar to the mission statement of any given Montessori school. Curious, creative and self-motivated students sure would make our jobs a lot easier, but we cannot discount how necessary grading and class ranks are to our system of higher education. Perhaps our current system is not broken, but it is in dire need of a modern tune-up. I certainly do not claim to have the answers, but I think we need to keep our minds wide open to discovery what is working in our educational system and what is not.

There are so many roles a great teacher could potentially take on, but usually on an extremely limited salary. I think the ideas mentioned above are hopeful, inspired and grand… but I also think we must devote time to understanding why these standards have not previously been met in higher education. Many are drawn to a career in higher education because they love research and writing. Many universities (specifically land-grant universities) will not higher a professional researcher without requiring this individual to also take on a significant teaching appointment. I agree teachers should be passionate about teaching, but how can we ensure that unwilling individuals are not unceremoniously pushed into these appointments to make tenure?

I agree with you. There are some majors where the teacher is expected to deliver information. I am actually in engineering and this is something that has to happen. However, the delivery mode of the teacher should be engaging and linked to real life examples. The examples should include how the basics that are learned in class could be used to solve real life complex problems. This will make students think critically, passionate about the topic, and make them believe that they actually can make a difference.

I think at this crucial time of integrating technological trends into education, it is our responsibility as professionals to act as educators, moderators, and above all communicators. It is the duty of the professional to ensure that our areas of expertise can be easily understood by the layperson. We cannot afford to sit in a position of privilege or rest on our laurels, and must work harder than our predecessors to create a new era of open dialogue and information exchange. Too long have professional fields been arenas of arrogance and ego. We have a tremendous opportunity to open the world of higher education to the masses through means of social media.

But who is asking for the cheat codes? The administrators who are trying to divide budgets by zero and demand standardized tests that encourage cheat codes, or the students that are a product of that culture? STEM is an interesting challenge. I think that there is room for creativity in delivery and innovation in teaching STEM. At some point though, students progress beyond survey courses and will need more than a mile wide and inch deep understanding. If we work on an interdisciplinary system of connected discovery, we may be able address part of the significance issue. I don’t know how we can restructure education enough to change the “mechanistic” and “product” views of it, but until we do product delivery will remain the focus of education.

I think we are both educators and moderators. Our main role is to teach, but we are actually constantly moderating, not just the digital media we may use for our classes, but also guiding the questions and answers of our students so they can better understand the material.

Regarding your questions on why are students bored and unengaged, I think there is a mutual responsibility between teachers and students, some sort of vicious cycle. Students get unmotivated when the professor fails to engage them into the topic, but professors also lose teaching stamina, when they see that only a handful of students show interest. Traditionally, either of the two groups (students or teachers) have been blamed for the lack of success of an educational system (students in the past, teachers more so nowadays), but there is obviously a shared responsibility.

Mr. Atkins,

Standardized testing does not measure many things, but one thing they most certainly do not measure is creativity. While many individuals may say that there field does not require creative practice, they all do in some way. Medicine field requires doctors to be creative in many ways. They may have to improv how they treat a patient. I think it becomes a quest for the individual to decide whether or not that want to understand how this relates to them. Unfortunately, many people do not want to look deeper. If they can’t see on the surface how it relates to them, then they look no further.

Yet, I think there comes a point in teaching when you simply have to accept that not everyone is going to be engage in the class and move on. I’m not sure if it is a shortcoming on the instructors part. I’m sure somewhere along the way for the student it was, but I think by the time they get to higher education these feelings for a student have already been defined and there is only so much we can change about thirteen year old habits. Students will either want to explore strange new places with us or not. It’s the job of the educator to give everyone the chance regardless.

Dr. Nelson recommended I read your blog post and I can clearly see why! I think if we group our heads together we could write a research paper about the topic with Dr. Nelson’s guidance :) In my blog, I was trying to find how to keep students intrigued while teaching so general knowledge topics (or facts). Although I focused a lot on engineering teaching methods given my background, your blog post gives the complete picture of what I was trying to say! A lot of students consider school as a training. Even lot of classes are taught this way which makes student more like machines that try to solve problems in a mindless way. Critical thinking and common sense is key to success and innovation. If we didn’t question what we have, build on it, understand its limitations, we would never move forward and come up with new ideas. Uncertainty in the method we have and where are not applicable would make students more curious and passionate about what they do. It is only then that students believe that they can make a change.

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