I absolutely love a great Ted Talk and even more so when I come across one that I have not yet seen. Having recently read Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s book, A New Culture of Learning, listening to Thomas’ Ted Talk helped drive home many of the concepts from his book, but from a different platform. The book highlights the importance of play and how incorporating play as an essential to learning is something that should not be avoided. Additionally, the book makes connections to gaming within online platforms to back up the argument. Within his Ted Talk, the focus is more on the essential need for imagination to foster the learning.
What hooked me from the very beginning was his explanation of learning. He points out that learning is natural and effortless in nearly all environments EXCEPT for schools. I could not have agreed with him more! As Douglas points out, when we allow and engage passion, we open up the floodgates to allow learning to flow in, but too often learning is overshadowed by a system deeply rooted in standardized testing.
Thomas points out that standardized testing is not at all about accountability, but instead is just a “surveillance” that serves as a vehicle moving towards normalization. This normalization focuses on treating “every student like every other student, and every teacher the same”, which only becomes toxic to creativity, passion and innovation. I’ve been in education for the past 7 years and can truly say that I find it heartbreaking that exceptional teachers are being driven out of the field because of the constraints placed upon us. Putting the focus on standardized testing, pulls the trust away from the teachers to provide environments that drive creativity, passion and innovation and instead awards sameness, while rejecting ideas and concepts that deviate away from this model. Thomas emphasizes that learning SHOULD be creative, and can even be FUN.
As I move through this course and through the program, I plan to focus on helping teachers create learning environments for their students that foster creativity, passion and innovation, and if we work together hopefully have some fun along the way!
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