[TED.COM] by Diana Laufenberg "How to learn from the mistake"

 summary ted.com

Diana Laufenberg tells the audiences about her experience in teaching in some schools. Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, she took off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas. She teaches a subject about American Government. In the first year, kids in the 12th grade not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system. The second year, she changes her tactic. She puts in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves. She didn't tell them what to do or how to do it. she posed a problem in front of them, which was to put on an election forum for their own community.

From Kansas, she moved on to Arizona. She taught in Flagstaff about geography. She asked the students to identify someone in their own life and produce a short movie about it, and nobody really knew how to make these short movies on the computer. Next, teaching Science Leadership Academy in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The students have to bring in  laptops with them everyday and take  them home to access the information to produce these info-graphics as a result of a unit that they decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill. They were a little uncomfortable with it, because they had never done this before, and they didn't know exactly how to do it. But she gave them the room to just do the thing, go create, go figure it out to see what they can do. And the student that persistently turns out the best visual product did not disappoint. This was done in like two or three days. And this is the work of the student that consistently did it.

The main point is that, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark. And everything that everybody is talking about today isn't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities, because we won't get there with a standardized test, and we won't get there with a culture of one right answer. We know how to do this better, and it's time to do better.