Foley argues that investing in children’s self-esteem for its own sake, divorced from achievement, has been a tactic through which we have let kids off the hook of intellectual challenge.

It matters that kids avoid relying on ‘easy success’ to get them the future they want. Trying to avoid or step around complexity and challenge is not the answer. We need to ensure that our schools are providing the sort of “low threat, high challenge’’ environment that will allow young people to fly high in complex and turbulent times. Less failsafe – more safefail. Our challenge as teachers is to provide all our young people with a deep and lasting experience of the pleasure and rigour of complex thinking. To do less is to be patronising. If we make easy success an easy option, we are helping those who are most in need to be more exposed and more vulnerable.

Yes, I agree that the appropriate pedagogy must be applied in order to make this a valuable learning experience. That’s why our partnership with Glen Bull and Willy Kjellstrom @UVA emphasizes teacher professional development and problem/project-based learning. I’ve written about that part here: http://thenetwork.typepad.com/architectureofideas/2010/08/play-and-the-engineering-design-process-.html

As to your comment about info access being low-hanging fruit and “simplest part”: I am not sure that I agree. Once again, it is what you do with the tools, how the tools are contextualized within a learning experience, that is important. (And, forget the technologies–building the relationships/connections with information and people is a complex process.) There is a lot to learn if our teachers are going to effectively leverage the access and make it meaningful to the learning process.

Reading Curriculum 21 for my current class also makes me reflect not only on pedagogy but also content.

What is the essential curriculum? What changes need to be made in each area of the curriculum?

This is as daunting a task and as exciting as the pedagogy piece.

Learning to undo any habits and beliefs we have been socialized in for 18 plus years will be difficult.

As long as we still have content heavy, high stakes exams hanging over schools we will continue to see the experimentation squeezed out of the system as our students progress towards high school and university. Even within the relatively enlightened educational environment of international schools, where I have worked for the past decade as a teacher and curriculum coordinator, I have seen the confidence in teachers, students and especially parents wilt towards the ‘experimental and error welcoming’ and push towards the scripted and restrictive the closer the students get towards high school. Just when the students are reaching the developmental stage where they can assert their intellectual individuality within projects that lead them to “assemble and dissemble cultural products” we stop doing them and instead bombard them with knowledge and test them on it.

This situation has led me to take Leadbeater’s advice and look for alternative models and I agree with him that this is the way we might find the transformational innovation I think many of us are looking for.

Colin Campbell

A teacher in the audience asked, “Do we?”

That question stumped me a bit and I’m beginning to have an answer.

Some teachers DO know what to do. If you are a teacher who remembers classrooms with Cuisenaire Rods, gerbils, books, a dress-up corner, high-interest reading books, painting easels, craft supplies, microscopes, plants, blocks, etc… then you have a special obligation to bring all of this BACK INTO YOUR CLASSROOM. That serves the children you teach and serves the generation of teachers you work with who may not know that this is an option.

-=Gary

I can’t emphasize loudly enough that information access is the low-hanging fruit and the simplest part of the learning process.

The system enables all of this by making the blueprint, the template, the map at the center of the process both for students and for teachers. We’re doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing because the map makes it all easy on the system. Same route for everyone.

But the piece before that is this: how many are being asked to change in the first place?

I was lucky enough to attend a PD session run by Erica McWilliam two weeks ago. I wrote about it here:
http://jennylu.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/erica-mcwilliam-pd-to-savour/
Link in there to an earlier paper she wrote that is well worth reading.

Jenny : )