As of today, 220 of you were kind enough to vote on what you thought were the 10 most important questions from the list that we generated at Educon. Here are the “winners” at the moment:
- How do we support the changing role of teacher? 116
- What is the role of the teacher? 110
- How do we help students discover their passions? 110
- What is the essential learning that schools impart to students? 109
- What is the purpose of school? 102
- How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using? 100
- What does an educated person look like today? 97
- How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning? 97
- What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school? 92
- How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity? 92
And here were the next three that didn’t quite make the cut:
- What is preventing us from being adaptable to change? 79
- How do you validate or evaluate informal learning? 77
- How do we measure or assess the effectiveness of individualized self-directed learning outside of school? 68
You can see the complete results here. We think it’s kind of interesting what didn’t get many votes. Obviously, few of us think physical space schools are going away anytime soon. And there doesn’t seem to be too much worry about the level of commitment schools have to kids. No doubt, the wording of some of these could probably have been better, but we think these 10 capture the challenges pretty well.
So what’s next?
The “plan” we proposed last week was to tackle each of these questions individually in a blog post and ask for comments to extend whatever thin thinking we throw at it with the eventual goal of “crowdsourcing” or collaboratively writing a response to each one. (And to be clear, we’re talking about crowdsourcing the response in the way Wikipedia does it.) If we’re really game, we might put this together in some form that could serve as a conversation starter for schools willing to tackle some of these “big” questions in their own planning-for-change process. Maybe we’ll even publish it as a book on Lulu.
So we’re wondering two things: first, what your reactions are to this list, and second, what your thoughts are on how we can turn this into something more “actionable”?