When Are We Going to Use This in Real Life?: Reinventing the box

You have either asked or fielded this question (or both) many times throughout the course of your life, ESPECIALLY if you are a teacher. I was always given the "it prepares your brain for a type of thinking" answer. That worked for a little while. But now that I see so much frustration, behavior issues, lack of comprehension, and LITTLE retention of knowledge, I feel like this question should be revisited and taken seriously. I'd also like to propose that we take this a little further....when will education LOOK like real life?

Right now we have so many measures, fine print, red tape, professional accountability "rubrics", acronyms, pyramids, maps charts...I really could go on and on here...that tell us how we should be teaching, reaching and learning. We herd kids from room to room while we force subjects on them deemed necessary by someone at some point. We segregate content from life and expect kids to connect the dots. Essentially, these are all attempts at rearranging  objects in a box so that we will hopefully and miraculously see big changes....NOT GONNA HAPPEN! We have tried to rearrange objects in a box instead of reinventing the box! So I say, let's reinvent the box.

I hear people say, a lot, that they would love to see more positive things happen in classrooms. They would like for there to be more positive affirmation from teachers, more hands-on and engaging activities, happier teachers, happier students for that matter, more interaction, more technology....but all of those things are just objects in the same big box we started with a few centuries ago.....yes I said centuries!(and we are essentially still doing it the same way??!!) Without a BIG shift in our thinking we will never get there. Education MUST be done differently. And I think now, more than ever, people are listening. We are seeing things like hybrid learning and virtual learning that is happening more and more. In brick and mortar settings we see blended learning, flipped instruction and PBL. These are POSITIVES!!! These are scenarios where there IS NO BOX! (or if there is, the walls of it are flexible!)

The future is bleak for those unwilling to modify what has always been done. (remember, agreeing or disagreeing is no longer a relevant point...the shift has already begun without us!) Researchers and experts say that we will see holography, sixth sense technology, biometrics, attention tracking, virtual platforms, peer-to-peer instruction, the decline of the public school system as we know it, and the undoing of all traditional models within 10-15 years. Some of this scares me (and I'm sure you too), HOWEVER, if we don't rethink, redesign and approach education differently we will continue to pump kids from high schools to prisons, and send our future decision makers ill-equipped into the job market. Yes, there are students that do well with how we do school now...think about how much better said students COULD do? How far could students go that don't go that far now under our current system?

Bottom line: have faith that embracing something new may actually change YOUR life. KNOW that it will change your students' lives. Doing things a little differently may cause you to love your job unlike you ever have. Consider it, and together, we can make big changes!