The role and responsibility of schooling in the future will require aptitudes not only from the teachers and school communities but also from the students themselves. Teachers will be able to accept the challenge of a diverse population of students and the development and challenges of a global expanse of technology and progress. This diversity I mentioned not only includes their student’s race and ethnic backgrounds but also the student’s interpretation and use of technology and innovation far beyond the methods the teachers themselves are familiar with. Schooling will consist of continuing educational programs not only for their faculty, but for the parents and community as well that will instruct them in skills and teaching design in order to nurture and develop the citizens of tomorrow. Students will have to be disciplined to obtain a skill set to learn in a changing new world of traditional school communities and global citizenship. With the Internet already having a powerful presence in today’s curriculum, its involvement will only continue to influence daily instruction and students must be prepared to adapt their style of learning to take advantage of it. In Howard Gardner’s book 5 Mind of the Future, five kinds of minds are characterized all of which will be essential to not only survive in the future but to thrive in it as well. His five minds include the Disciplined Mind, the Synthesizing Mind, the Creative Mind, the Respectful Mind and the Ethical Mind. Gardner says that a creative mind has been praised in the emerging technological age and I could not agree more. I believe the students who have a more creative mind will become more connected with the ever changing world and will eventually design the new future for technology and its interpretations into one’s everyday life and their schools must evolve in order to nurture and support their development.
The experience that teachers should employ to make their student’s learning more authentic is to in fact treat each of their students authentically. Students should not be observed as a statistic to measure graduation rates or standardized test score. Students must be viewed as a different learner who is a different pupil from their peers, not seen as a student who can either learn or one who cannot. As Jeannie Oakes and Martin Lipton point out in Teaching to Change the World, teaching communities have fostered a belief that certain students are judged based on whether or not they have the capability to learn and depending on that capability they are challenged accordingly or not at all. I completely disagree with this theory and believe that every student, if challenged in a nurturing and positive environment, should be able to exceed the school’s expectations as well as their own. It is not acceptable to set such low expectations for students simply due to the fact that the global society has high potentials for knowledge, ingenuity and creativity. Teachers and school communities would do more harm than good by not challenging a student and helping them reach the increasing potentials society calls upon them to live up to. Teachers and the teaching community will be forced to change their own styles of teaching to support and nurture the new kinds of thinking that both Gardner and Oakes and Lipton defend.
Sources used:
Gardner, H. (2008). 5 Mind of the Future. Boston, MA. Harvard Business Press.
Oakes, J. and M. Lipton. (2007). Teaching to Change the World. New York, NY. Mc-Graw Hill.
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