Priority One hosted a local screen of the EdDocumentary, Most likely to succeed at Mount Mauganui College on Thursday night. There were about 150 others there to watch this much talked about movie. The NZ debut had been at the ULearn ’15 conference and I had seen a couple of reviews.
The film starts with a description of the challenges that education faces. There was a nice piece on the rapid development of technology and how that is a key influencer for change in our education system. It started with how ‘Deep Blue’ beat Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997, then described how the ‘Watson’ computer had won the game show of Jeopardy against past champions in 2011. The point is we now have computers being able replace not only simple mechanical tasks that we once had to do, like making cars, but also now intellectual tasks. There are now applications, such as Narrative Science, that have replace human jobs such as report writing.
The story then looked at the roots of the modern education system which occurred in Prussia reportedly as a response to a defeat in a war. This model is largely unchanged over the last century. We were then introduced to High Tech High, which was suggested as a model that education should adopt. In this school, teachers are employed on a one year contract and don’t have to follow a prescribed curriculum or teach to a test. This gave enormous freedom to what they planned for their students. Much emphasis was place on self directed learning in authentic contexts and the students were ‘assessed’ at an end of year exhibition night.
One key message I got was the analogy of a teacher like a gardener. This was made by a short interview piece with Sir Ken Robinson (of the TED talk – ‘Do schools kill creativity?‘ fame).
“Nobody else can make anybody else learn anything. You cannot make them. Anymore than if you are a gardener you can make flowers grow, you don’t make the flowers grow. You don’t sit there and stick the petals on and put the leaves on and paint it. You don’t so that. The flower grows itself. Your job if you are any good at it is to provide the optimum conditions for it to do that, to allow it to grow itself.” – Source
All in all, a good flick that prompted some thinking about some possible changes to my own teaching practice.
