Wednesday, February 16, 2011

One Idea on How to Fix Our Broken K-12 Educational System

I found the following idea from http://www.ideasforourfuture.com/ pretty interesting and wondered what others think (It is listed under TOPIC 4). I recommend reading and discussing the pros and cons of the other ideas on the site as well with your peers, colleagues, and classmates. These would be great problems to tackle in our schools.

This problem deals with the question "How can we Fix Our Broken K-12 Educational System?" PROPOSED ANSWER: Recruit Our Top Teachers and Produce EXCITING World-Class Lessons on Video and use them in both the online and face to face classrooms of the world.

Big Ideas:
  • The idea starts as an ingenious new reality TV show, selecting the absolute best K-12 teachers (for every grade and every subject) in the USA.
  • the winning teachers (one for every grade & every subject) will be professionally video recorded in their actual home classrooms for one entire school year
  • The half-hour videos, one for each class period, will give the home classroom teacher equal time per hour to introduce, pause the show, elicit classroom comment and answer questions. The videos won’t be a "threat" to the home teachers; rather, CS will relieve them of having to insure required material is presented, as well as relieving them of having to prepare their daily lessons.
  • In-class teachers will be inspired by the excellent teaching examples and by the possibility of someday becoming celebrity teachers themselves.
  • CS videos will be universally available (i would add online) for take-home use (repetitive viewing is crucial) and for family entertainment.
  • CS will bring top quality education to the poorest urban ghetto schools and the tiniest country schools all over the country. They will be made available to prison inmates to view (and finally get a quality education) rather than watching ordinary TV or video games. The videos are a natural for the internet and will also be shown on dedicated CS TV channels as "edu-tainment", similar to Nova, Cosmos, Discovery & the History Channel (but much more exciting to watch).
What do you think about this idea? Pros and Cons? Why haven't we leveraged our best teachers in the world in such a systemic and organized way?

3 comments:

Chris Willis said...

If we really want to save our K-12 schooling system we need to stop thinking in terms of grade levels, content areas, and classrooms. The time has come to put aside the elements of that system and launch a new one that is free from those old constructs. I hope my grandchildren (my oldest is currently in 8th grade) will read Shakespere but will never take a class called Sophamore English. This idea totally lost me when it presented a new way to concieve the old system vs offering a real change.

Terence said...

I agree with you that we shouldn't be looking for "a new way to concieve the old system." I also agree that education needs to move beyond traditional grade levels, content areas, and classrooms. What I think is neat about this idea is what might come from crowd-sourcing the best teachers in the world is that these teachers may reveal the best models for facilitating differentiated instruction, discovery learning, and problem based learning.

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