The Real-World Inspires
Don’t you just love it when something you advocate a lot is affirmed by someone else? Well, I do! Anyway, yesterday during the keynote lunch panel discussion at the Excelin Ed National Summit on Education 2022 entitled “A 21st-Century Education: Critical Skills for Every Student’s Success” the rest of the attendees at Table 18 kept looking over at me and kept saying things like, “you say that all the time.” And, yes, that was true! I have known one of the keynote panelists, Hadi Partovi, for a long time. Hadi is CEO of the education nonprofit Code.org. I have always known Hadi to be very insightful as what our scholars need to know when continuing the learning journey after high school. Notice I call it a “learning journey” because no matter whether a scholar chooses enrollment, employment, or enlistment, they will be continuing on a learning journey. I am approaching the six decade mark and I am still on an incredible learning journey. In fact, I am not so sure I haven’t learned more in the last year than at any point in my life. How cool is that?
Back to Hadi because some of his comments are the focus here. He said:
- “If kids are excited to learn something, they will go learn it.” – I am thinking TikTok here. I am pretty sure none of our students took a TikTok course in their school.
- “Don’t worry about the order in which we schedule scholars to learn things; more importantly, we need to be inspiring students to go learn.” – Personally, I always advocate that how students are learning is at least as important, if not more important than what they are learning. Learning howto learn is the most important thing we can do in the world today.
- “Relevance and inspiration go together!” – Who knew? Every scholar in every school in the world! They might not say it, although they do, when they say things like, “Why do I need to know this?” If that Hand in the Back of The Room can’t be answered there will be NO inspiration to learn. Trust me, I know because I was that student with his hand up in the back of the room almost six decades ago now.
Bottom-line: we must remember that the real-world inspires. Our students are the expert in their own life in context, no one else is. Our kids are learning in a complex social environment. Our students will inherit the future and we need to do everything we can to have them ready to learn and have the creative designs to solve the future issues.
Byron's Babbles 
[…] learn it, so they learned without being taught. I actually did a post on this last year entitled, “The Real-World Inspires.” Today I want to go a little further and talk about the idea of to learn without being taught. We […]
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