"To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education is always about relationships. Great teachers are not just instructors and test administrators: They are mentors, coaches, motivators, and lifelong sources of inspiration to their students. Teaching is an art form. Great teachers know they have to cultivate curiosity, passion and creativity in their students."
~Ken Robinson=
- Why We Need to Reform Education Now - "TEDTalks Education" premiering Tuesday, May 7, 2013 at 10/9c on PBS
"What should America do about its disastrous high school dropout rate? That's the focus of TEDTalks Education, the first ever TED/PBS television special, hosted by John Legend, the award-winning musician. The program looks not only at what's going wrong in high schools, but how to put it right...
One of the themes of TEDTalks Education is that current policies are based on a tragic misdiagnosis of the problem. They treat education as an industrial process rather than as a human one. They are driven by a culture of testing and standardization that has narrowed the curriculum and sees students as data points and teachers as functionaries rather than as living breathing people.
Ramsey Musallam is a high school chemistry teacher, who shows how achievement soars when teachers fire the imaginations of their students with a true spirit of inquiry.
All students have their own stories, motivations and circumstances and teachers have to connect with them personally. Psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth talks about the importance of encouraging students' positive attitudes to life and learning -- or 'grit', as she calls it. Pearl Arredondo is a powerful example of grit.
She who grew up as the daughter of a 'ranking gang member" in East Los Angeles. After being 'saved' by inspirational teachers, she qualified as a teacher herself and returned to her old school to help transform the lives of others. "Everyone has a story," she says. "Everyone has a struggle and everyone needs help along the way."
All young people have unique talents and interests. In his moving poem, Malcolm London argues that education has to connect with the real lives of young people and not stifle their hopes and dreams.
Geoffrey Canada is the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, which has a 100 percent graduation rate. We have millions of young people walking away from education, he says. But "right now, we could save them all," if we're prepared to innovate fundamentally and not just do more of the same. He sees schools everywhere following the same dull routines as when he was at school over 50 years ago, "and no-one is going crazy enough about it to say that enough is enough... America can't wait another fifty years to get this right."
The key to personalizing education is to invest properly in the professional development of educators. As Bill Gates argues, teachers need mentors too. Supporting educators to become the best they can be is one of the surest routes to improving the nation's schools. In my view, we should then give them the creative freedom to innovate and do their jobs within a proper framework of public accountability.
There are those who say that we can't afford to personalize education to every student. The fact is that we can't afford not to. Watch the program and see what I mean."
~Sir Ken Robinson~
TED Talks Education, hosted by John Legend, premieres Tuesday, May 7, 2013 at 10/9c on PBS
http://www.ted.com/promos/
Ken Robinson's full Huffington Post article here: http://
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