Education Writing by Terry Heick

“How can you tell if a student really understands something?”

Teaching disruptively has less to do with defiance and the undermining of practices in schools and districts that range from good to well-intentioned to mediocre to downright ineffective.

Audience and purpose are primal. They have to come first or none of it makes any sense. And so it goes with pedagogy. Who are you teaching, and why? Who exactly, and why exactly?

To be self-aware in your own knowledge, and the limits of that knowledge? To clarify what can be known, and what cannot?

In focusing on narrow data from a fixed curriculum using universal assessments, it might be that we’ve gotten the learning process itself all knotted up. Curiously, there haven’t been very many attempts to make learning, in and of itself, visible.

We erect a sense of self to withstand the sheer momentum of the text, then rummage through the debris when it’s all over to see what’s left behind. And what we find is who we are. That’s why students should read.

If formal learning environments driven by outcomes-based systems have taught us nothing else, it’s that while we often can “cause” something to happen in learner, it is only by considerable effort, resources, and angst.

How can a school call itself ‘good’ when it produces students that don’t know themselves, the world, or their place in it?

It is a general consensus that making mistakes is an important part of the learning process. Despite this, in our educational system, mistakes are more often punished than seen as an opportunity to learn. What then can we do to help our students learn from their mistakes?

The result of any system of education should be full transparency so that it offers itself up selflessly to the people and communities it serves.

The difference between students and learners is an important one.

Want to create learning through play but don’t want the learning purely open-ended and curiosity-based? This level begins to apply actual ‘models’ or suggestions.

The goal of the model is simple enough–not pure academic proficiency, but instead authentic self-knowledge, diverse local and global interdependence, adaptive critical thinking, and adaptive media literacy.

The Rational Mind necessarily excludes curiosity, love, affection, and joy because they are inherently irrational.

The word ‘mind’ suggests something different than the current gears and catalysts provide. A ‘brain’ may seek an input to produce an output, but a mind is curious and wants to play.