Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson's provocative video on educational paradigms resonates with me greatly. I first viewed it in a class when I was in the credential program, and at the time, I was reviewing the Industrial Revolution with my World History students. I took the opportunity to show them the video (skipping the part about ADHD), and asked them for their reactions. Aside from enjoying the animation, my students reacted very positively. One student was pragmatic, saying that he made good points but it's not like you're going to change the whole education system. I agreed with him, but I told him it's always possible to make small changes. I then used the opportunity to explain again to my students my reasoning behind my teaching methods. At the beginning of every lesson, we started class with a warm up question, which students wrote about in the journals, and then we discussed as a class. The questions were related to what we were studying that day, but were always open-ended questions, with no one right answer. We had many wonderful discussions, but there were always students or moments when they resisted it, and complained that they just wanted to know what the "right answer" was. Additionally, I often organized lessons around classroom discussion, and had them do quick writes formulatd in the same way. So in discussing the video, I told them that I was trying to encourage them to be divergent thinkers, and I used it as chance to remind them that I wanted them to study histories, not history, and that as they continue on, they needed to keep two questions always in mind: why? and, in whose interests? Robinson's video gave me an excellent way to frame the discussion.