Getting Back to Dewey

Grant Lichtman’s Denver TED Talk gives practical reasons why many schools continue to miss the bar when it comes to truly educating students for what Grant calls “timeless life skills.” He believes schools are dealing with many issues; however, Grant believes their core issues are:

inability to fully “embrace creativity and innovation”;
inability to get beyond ourselves “(insular) in order to explore what others are doing”;
inability to prepare our students “for their future and not our past”.

A strong proponent for progressive education (go Dewey), Grant, ultimately, believes school’s failure to properly educator students is directly link to an industrial rather than progressive model of education. Like Grant, I believe that we must “teach into the unknown so that students will become self-evolving learners.” I do not want my students to leave school thinking they have limitations to their learning. If they love science, I want them to know the skills that they have acquired in their science classes are useful and transferable. Grant’s talk resonated with me because his vision of teaching and learning has no limits. I want my school to be one that approaches the learning experience as a journey without limits — a journey looking “ahead and not behind”. tlb

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