Week 3- blog 5 response to Andrew

I agree with you Andrew, that schools need evolution to move forward. The only problem with that is the fact that to get that move we may need revolution to get the the giant to move. I believe change is happening in many places, but overall it's moving to slow. How many digital thinking students are we going to sacrifice before we realize it's time? That's what I'm worried about. On the idea of changing our mental models you're right. How many assumptions are made in education that are just plain wrong. We need to spend more time looking at why we do things.

One of the first people I added to my PLN was Scott McLeod. He has a great web blog called Dangerously Irrelevant. (see the link below) Today he posted a little blurb about how the biggest barrier to changing schools is our mental model of schools. This is very timely because my own thinking has been leading me right down that same path.

In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed on reentry into the atmosphere, tragically killing all 7 astronauts. The primary reason this happened was because a large piece of foam insulation on the External fuel tank broken off and put a hole in Columbia’s heat shield. The larger reason this happened though was a failure on NASA’s part to envision this could happen. Pieces of foam had fallen off for the last 100+ shuttle flights but had never caused a lot of damage. Therefore the engineers and managers accepted this as routine instead of asking what if. In fact they had been dodging a bullet each flight and it finally hit them.

This failure to envision things outside the norm is a big problem in any endeavor. The school system has many factors that are holding back innovation and this failure of vision is a big part of it. I also think that the bigger the risk to change, then the more we don’t want to see possible failure. If we try to change the school system with some massive government directed “one size fits all” approach, then we won’t be able to see the flaws coming.

What I think should happen is we setup lots of different kinds of schools (which is happening in some areas) and make sure the lessons learned get passed around to all educators. The school system need evolution, not revolution. That way not as much is at risk with each step and perhaps we will be able to see a little bit more down the road.

Our mental models are the biggest barrier to moving schools forward into a digital, global era – Dangerously Irrelevant

What is the biggest barrier to moving schools forward into a technology-suffused, globally-interconnected era? Our mental models of what schooling should look like.