Tashia Mossman

Viewing Douglas Thomas' TED Talk, A New Culture of Learning, is encouraging and inspiring. His three main areas of creating a new culture of learning are: 

  1. Engage passion.

  2. Imagination, or "What if...?"

  3. Constraint, or create in the face of obstacles.

I love all three of these ideas, and I feel I've adopted some of his suggestions. However, in the interest of continuous improvement, I hope to incorporate more of these philosophies. 

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The idea of engaging passion is naturally incorporated into my curriculum in that my students are designing solutions to real-world problems. In their quest to design the perfect product or system, they get very emotionally attached to their ideas and respond passionately when faced with criticism. They want to show off their designs, and therefore, they put in a lot of time and effort to make them the best they can.

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In teaching design and engineering concepts, I often have students who think they are too limited by constraints. So I sometimes remove certain requirements, allowing more freedom in their designs. The students quickly find that constraints are helpful! Having limitless possibilities makes it difficult for them to create designs that are truly useful and practical. They begin to recognize that some limitations are actually helpful in guiding them to a better end result.

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One of the ideas Mr. Thomas pointed out in his TED Talk was that we must reevaluate the assumption that teachers must be the experts in the classroom. While I had some reservations about this idea in the past, now I couldn't agree more! I used to teach math and I felt it necessary to always be the expert when students had questions. Frankly, it is exhausting and a lot of pressure. Since making the switch to teach my current topics (engineering, robotics, bio-med, and architecture), I'm happy to admit that I don't know everything and have invited the students to find solutions to problems faster than I am able. There's no way I will ever know everything about all these topics and I've finally accepted that. I've found that students seem to respect me more for admitting I'm not an expert, and now we search for answers together. The pressure to be the all-knowing, all-powerful fountain of knowledge is removed. I find it very rewarding when a student is curious enough to find answers to his/her own questions and then educate me in what they've learned. 

 

I feel many of my colleagues are also letting go of this title of "expert" and are more willing to invite students to be the educators when possible. Those that are not willing to let that go seem to feel frustrated and increasingly blame students when lessons do not go well. Children are used to getting the information they want immediately through their phones, internet, TV, et cetera. As Mr. Thomas said, teachers are just another source of information. If we withhold or deny students answers to their questions, they'll simply look elsewhere. Let's work with them to encourage and support their curiosity. 

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I invite you to read more about how I hope to make my students the teachers in my Innovation Plan.