I’ve been getting heavily involved in a company dealing first hand with education reform. Most of this is new to me, but as a recent college graduate, I’ve experienced all of this firsthand. I’ve seen the pitfalls in our education system.

Now, as an entrepreneur, I see what needs to be fixed and how we can get there.

Thanks for all your work.

I look forward to more.

I loved your talk and I have the same sentiments about our education system, despite me being a fairly new college student. What I found personal to me was one particular slide, basically summing a big portion of your presentation up. The slide read “school=test prep.” There has been this ongoing conflict in my mind as I watched videos similar to yours. I agree that tests are A way to assess the knowledge of a student, but I don’t believe it’s the best, yet, as the point was brought up earlier by others, tests are so vital to our system. Despite this, I also wonder HOW one would go assessing a student’s knowledge. Without testing, we probably wouldn’t know how to.

The idea for life preparation made me think of my high school. My high school was a little charter school that basically prided itself on project based learning. All our learning was assessed on the outcome of a project. Despite its inefficiency to allow quick assessment of what we learned, it definitely tested what we knew and most of these projects applied to real life. Making a guitar included understanding logarithms, use of certain woods, sound waves, etc. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to base people’s experiences off of things they’ve done, rather than a score on a sheet? Even a score on a project sounds more impressive than a score on a paper. And what did my school do to prepare us for CST testing? Almost nothing. Maybe a little here and there, but most of the material on those tests, we already knew because of what we were taught. A lot of these standardized tests, I find, just require us students to spit back material. It doesn’t really engage or apply what we know.

Excuse me for going on a bit long about this, but I just felt compelled to give an extended explanation of why, even a student like me, feels that there needs to be reform within the public education system. Oh, and the reason I came across this was I work as the student assistant at the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at the University of California (http://dmlcentral.net), and I was supposed to scour the internet for sources that were relevant to education and learning. I just felt compelled to put in my two cents here.

Your talk just summed up 12 years of thoughts and feelings I have had as a school counselor, administrative intern and a parent. The frustration and stress felt by parents and especially kids in our current system is reaching a tipping point. The system needs to tranform and evolve into something new. The wave that will carry this is parent outcry.
While I believe some testing is necessary, fundamentally we should be looking at inspiring kids to want to learn. Engagement of students in the digital world is paramount in helping schools evolve. Keep up the good work, there are more of us out here that feel the same way!

I think school in a lot of ways is like waiting. You are waiting to graduate, waiting to go to college, waiting to get your first job.

Now you can engage yourself in the actual job, right now. You can learn music composition and even launch a career at 16. You could learn a year’s worth of university programming and begin creating computer games on your own. You can keep abreast of the latest developments in a field of interest and reach a level of expertise with the proper guidance much sooner than it was previously possible. The key is self motivation.

There is potential to double the amount of professionally related skills and knowledge in every child with this kind of system but it very much relies on the student’s own ability to guide and motivate themselves. Sure there are a lot of boring basic skills and things that still need to be taught. People should know history even if they hate it but there should be time in the day for personalized self directed learning, and a crossover to the core subjects as well.

You don’t have to “wait” to grow up to do these things.

At any rate, any doctor whose care you’ve been under, any bridge you’ve driven over, any plane / car / bus you’ve ever travelled in; all made possible by people who had to demonstrate their mastery through a battery of regimented testing scenarios.

I find it curious that you maintain your position by using the most extreme and uncommon cases in society (Zuckerburg, Gates, et al.) as a way of defining your premise in an argument. Perhaps you would like to rethink that aspect of your mentation…?

I basically tell them this is my unofficial goal at the beginning of the semester, in almost the same exact words, but most just don’t get it.

When Helping Students Hurts Students http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/coach_gs_teaching_tips/2011/03/when_helping_students_hurts_students.html

Differentiated Instruction: A Practical Approach
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/coach_gs_teaching_tips/2010/10/differentiated_instruction_a_practical_approach.html

I agree that moving away from testing is difficult, but believe it can be done. I am in the middle of trying to figure out ways that I can restructure my courses so that there is less of me talking, and more ways for students to be in charge of there own learning. I have already moved away from multiple choice tests in favor of practical exams, and am now evaluating ways that I can address the work that they do throughout the semester. I am thinking of making it so that instead of turning in assignments that I grade and give back, that I will require them to show the assignments to me and we can go over what they are doing correctly, and what needs work. It is just the logistics that I need to work out.

So, here’s the thumbnail. I’ve been contracted by Central China Normal University and the Chinese Ministry of Education to run a pilot project that amounts to an “all-English US college preparatory program” inside a traditional Chinese public school. (6,000 students in grades 10-12) I’ve got a cohort of 150 students who will NOT BE PREPARING FOR THE NATIONAL CHINESE UNIVERSITY EXAM (known as the GaoKao). Instead, they will prepare for study abroad in a Western-style university.

Chinese “teaching” is far and away the leader in test “training” (). Anyone that wants to hold up this “training” system as a model for economic advancement in the 21st century had better spend some time talking with Chinese students, teachers, parents, and multi-national corporations that want to boost their hiring inside China. The system is a mess and threatens to stall Chinese economic progress made over the past 30 years. (The first stage of industrialization is always the easiest. Get workers you can “train” to do repetitive tasks at very low wages.)

As you know, I’ve been working with Heidi Jacobs. And her TEDxNYC was terrific, too But, man, yours was the best!