Tuesday, September 22, 2020

The Need for Disruptive Education

Centro de la Cultura Herediana, Heredia, Costa Rica
Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña (2017)

The Need for Disruptive Education

Some considerations


         Do students want or have to listen to their teachers? Long ere this thought of a disruptive education, in which educators only wanted their students to sit down and listen to them, but the fact is that there are several education paradigms like the one above that prevail and that only make us think of how things have always been done in only one way. And there we have instructors on top of paradigm watchtowers preventing colleagues from making changes in the education their pupils are getting today. Learners should want to listen to their teachers because they can help them construct their knowledge and will not make them regurgitate what was mentioned in class.

         If tickets to attend one’s class were sold, will one’s students buy them? With this question Lewin (2020) makes educators question their role in the classroom and the teacher’s soliloquy employed at times in class where no higher order thinking skills are employed by learners. Lewin longs to have sight of disruptive classrooms where paradigms are constantly broken for the sake of student learning. Education is not just about regurgitating information; it has to go through various channels to become learning. As pointed out by Peter, de Roche, Graf, & Gatziu Grivas, (2019), “skills are used to designate the ability to use one’s knowledge with relative ease to perform relatively simple tasks.” And when these skills are pracited in class they can become competencies. And when students can develop competencies in class one’s class tickets will always be sold out. Learning will always be present to engage pupils at all times.

For a while, the traditional educators will remain in thought, and they will continue to be the warders of education with recurrent paradigms or will embrace a disruptive education willfully. It is not right to sulk about the need for refocusing learning; what educators have to do is to start selling tickets for their classes because, as Lewin (2020) insists, this disruption will generate critical thinking, creativity, and a desire for learning, which will make students’ skills become competencies. In other words, the competence of a learner or cohort of pupils must “describe the relationship between the tasks assigned to or assumed by the person or group and their capability and potential to deliver the desired performance” (Peter, de Roche, Graf, & Gatziu Grivas, 2019). When a desired performance is achieved, students will be learning by doing and coming to class for the pleasure of constructing their knowledge and participating in experiences that will strengthen their competence.

A disruptive education, free of aged, decrepit, enfeebled paradigms, will feed a growth mindset with room for risk-taking experiences and failure. Lewin (2020) states that capitalized mistakes is pure learning, which is pretty much what Oscar Wilde (2005) once said about experience: “it is merely the name men give their mistakes,” and students need to make mistakes to consolidate their learning. Engaging students in their learning is by far the best lesson of life you can give them; “I can do it” (Lewin, 2020). And they will be able to make mistakes and learn and will learn to become autonomous, self-disciplined, and self-regulated.

References

Lewin, L. (2020, Setiembre 15). La Innovación LLega al Aula. Escuela para Directivos, Laureate Languages. Buenos Aires, Argentina: ABS International.

Peter, M., de Roche, M., Graf, M., & Gatziu Grivas, S. (2019, June). Skills and Competencies for Digital Transformation. Retrieved September 21, 2020, from ResearchGate.Com: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336375389_Skills_and_Competencies_for_Digital_Transformation_Initiatives_-_Development_of_a_model_to_identify_relevant_skills_and_competencies_for_a_company's_individual_digital_transformation_roadmap

Wilde, O. (2005). The Picture of Dorian Gray. Clayton, Delaware: Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Press.

 


The Need for Disruptive Education by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd

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