Reflection
What has always excited me about working in education is the opportunity to create experiences and environments for students that support academic achievement, social development and discovery. Over the past 20 years I’ve watched how students acquire new knowledge and been able to develop processes that fuel momentum of student interest and intrigue in the world around them. This has been my fundamental marker of achievement and success. As education continues to evolve towards greater emphasis on standard-based achievement, it is vital to ensure students have access to self-directed exploration and creativity to maintain, and to build on, their curiosity, motivation and persistence.
Sir Kenneth Robinson’s TED Talk, How Schools Kill Creativity, presented the idea that while schools work toward education reformation for the 21st century, they often plan for a future with a blueprint from the past. So many aspects of education continue to adhere to an industrial factory-based model of education that classifies students by academic proficiency and adopts a curricular and instructional standardization that often fails to support students’ natural curiosity and creativity. Researching for a class that focused on foundational educational theories, I was drawn to the idea of self-directed learning. Self-directed learning views education as a collaboration between teacher and student that allows for learners to be the owners and managers of their education. It fosters a collaborative learning environment that promotes creativity and variance of opinion and perspective. This practice also allows for thorough exploration of subject matter across disciplines and integrates academics with emotional intelligence. I decided to use this framework within my own education, classroom, and programming as a powerful bridge from theory to practice. Through this framework, I created educational opportunities that attended to creativity and fostered individuality and independence.
As a result, my most meaningful exchanges and initiatives in education have been student-led. By allowing students to focus on content within a collaborative model, I was able to direct programming that provided an opportunity for them to connect among themselves and others. Through this, students experienced becoming leaders, developed new skill-sets and leveraged personal and collective motivation to create something that instilled pride and resulted actualized accomplishment. Capitalizing on student’s natural curiosity was an avenue for students to take on problems as challenges, gain self-confidence, and instill an implicit awareness of their responsibility - and ability- to make learning meaningful.
Knowing that most of what is taught in classrooms has an expiration date, education must continue to focus on teaching students how to develop their natural curiosity that enables a trajectory of lifelong learners. Theories will always continue to develop, best practices will always change, and technology will forever evolve; through this, instilling a skill set that focuses on teaching others how to become an explores and advocates in their education, has become central to my core work. Essentially, what has been exciting about education, is my ability to help student have the self-confidence to develop their own education in the classroom and beyond.
Sir Kenneth Robinson’s TED Talk, How Schools Kill Creativity, presented the idea that while schools work toward education reformation for the 21st century, they often plan for a future with a blueprint from the past. So many aspects of education continue to adhere to an industrial factory-based model of education that classifies students by academic proficiency and adopts a curricular and instructional standardization that often fails to support students’ natural curiosity and creativity. Researching for a class that focused on foundational educational theories, I was drawn to the idea of self-directed learning. Self-directed learning views education as a collaboration between teacher and student that allows for learners to be the owners and managers of their education. It fosters a collaborative learning environment that promotes creativity and variance of opinion and perspective. This practice also allows for thorough exploration of subject matter across disciplines and integrates academics with emotional intelligence. I decided to use this framework within my own education, classroom, and programming as a powerful bridge from theory to practice. Through this framework, I created educational opportunities that attended to creativity and fostered individuality and independence.
As a result, my most meaningful exchanges and initiatives in education have been student-led. By allowing students to focus on content within a collaborative model, I was able to direct programming that provided an opportunity for them to connect among themselves and others. Through this, students experienced becoming leaders, developed new skill-sets and leveraged personal and collective motivation to create something that instilled pride and resulted actualized accomplishment. Capitalizing on student’s natural curiosity was an avenue for students to take on problems as challenges, gain self-confidence, and instill an implicit awareness of their responsibility - and ability- to make learning meaningful.
Knowing that most of what is taught in classrooms has an expiration date, education must continue to focus on teaching students how to develop their natural curiosity that enables a trajectory of lifelong learners. Theories will always continue to develop, best practices will always change, and technology will forever evolve; through this, instilling a skill set that focuses on teaching others how to become an explores and advocates in their education, has become central to my core work. Essentially, what has been exciting about education, is my ability to help student have the self-confidence to develop their own education in the classroom and beyond.