Change is inevitable: How do schools adapt?

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Check out eSchoolNews’ recent Special Report on “Convergent Education”. The report highlights how innovative online content providers such as Curriki, the JASON Project and Thinkfinity are “beginning to change how education works”.

The following is a quote from the report:

Change is inevitable: How do schools adapt?

Experts say a change in thinking among educators is needed for the country’s educational system to be prepared for convergent education.

Students need to be taught more critical thinking, says Magee (a preK-12 science supervisor for the Beaumont Independent School District in Texas). When learners are made to memorize facts and then spit them back, they are not learning how to think.

Memorization “means nothing, especially with the kinds of students we have today,” Magee says. “There’s no reason to memorize it. They have access to information 24/7, their hands are on the computer.” It’s better, she says, to understand the how and the why of something rather than just memorizing content.

Kurshan agrees. Students need to know content, but more than that, they need to understand the process of learning, she says: how to realize what knowledge they’re missing, and then how to discover the answers to what they don’t know. “It’s not the content that needs to be changed. There’s not a whole lot of ways to change the content of math,” she explains. “It’s the way you teach that has to be changed.”

To read the full eSchoolNews Special Report, click here.

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