[ #tep10 ] We're tackling the wrong (one-teacher one-classroom) problem

Notes from The Education Project, Bahrain, complete with spelling errors, misappropriations and personal bias added without necessarily letting you know. Enjoy.

Charles Leadbeater opened the first panel this morning by noting that education policy often sets about tackling the wrong problems with a ton of solutions. Instead, he believes, we should spend far more time finding the right problems to tackle.

In questions, an American working at University in the UAE made some interesting remarks about what she considered the main wrong problem we're tackling in education reform:

"Our students are going to the web because that's where the network is. We are tackling the wrong problem. The problem we're trying to solve is making the one teacher in one classroom better. Forget about it. We know that four-teacher classrooms with 100 students, teachers working together, collaboratively, as we expect the students to do, work better than one-classroom one-teacher setups. Teachers are not super(wo)men - they're normal people who, like our students, work better together than on their own."

Pic from GoldenDragon

Comments

[paulmartin42]

Up here such a multi-teacher/student scenario works quite well. There are issues such as staff training as well as the fact that the geography of the class has to be well judged - I have seen quite a few architecturally impressive attempts at replicating our success struggle in practice.

[Sheena]

The truth is we're human, and we need each other's encouragement and insights. Aligning our strengths and priorities can go a long way!

1000s of us from different youth movements are convening in November in the U.S. for the BigTent Conference. We'll talk about what youth need to succeed and how we can work together to make it happen. http://www.BigTentConference.com