The Wrong Bet: Why Common Curriculum & Standards Won’t Help
After reading “The Wrong Bet” by Zhao Y.,
I completely agree with the idea that the traditional education paradigm is
outdated. The world has changed.
Emerging technology has been changing the world at a tremendous pace.
Zhao mentions that many countries
want to adopt national standards to compete successfully in this globalized
world. Governments have invested billions of dollars to make new reforms, new
standardized tests, be aligned with college and work expectations. Governments
want to modernize by prescribing and enforcing what students should learn. But
they have failed so far.
For instance in Mexico, private schools
are more concerned in the results from PISA (Programme for International Student
Assessment). If schools get higher scores, students are more prepared in Maths,
Language Arts and Science. That is not true. Mexican teachers focus their
instruction on content rather than critical or inquiry skills. I think that we are having a “test oriented” education.
In the past, there was more classroom instruction and today we are more worried
about test preparation.
In order to compensate some deficiencies
in our educational system, we need to have professional development along the massive technological changes. One way is to prepare students to develop innovative products with the use of mobile devices working collaboratively. Another way is by inviting parents to be involved in their children’s interests, needs and potentials. Let's try to implement different kinds resources in classrooms in a 24/7 environment to motivate learners to be fully prepared for the future.
There are over seven billion people living
on earth today. There is plenty of competition for everyone. That’s why I truly
believe that today educators have to teach our kids 21st century
skills to survive in the global economy. I want to contribute with the
education in Mexico by preparing students to become World Class Learners.
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Pedro, I completely agree with you, we are in a test oriented education where parents feel pride that their kids are at school where the got high results in ENLACE and they barely know what taht standarized test is about and also they cannot understand that in order to succed on it students need to memorize tons of concepts that will be usless later... We need to have more proactive parents that are really involved in their kids education. Also it would be great to get rid of the "grades race", that is a lot of times meaningless, they can learn a lot more form experimenting, by correcting their mistakes but that is not exactly reflected in ther grades. What a A can mean in one school can be different in an other... Yes, we need to teach them to be thinkers, to analize but not only to compete.
ReplyDeleteIsabel
I Believe we need to focus our education efforts towards what will really help prepare our students to cope with the demands of a globalizes world.
ReplyDeleteThe task is not an easy one because, as was mentioned before, both government institutions and parents put a lot of pressure on preparing students to achieve high scores on tests that supposedly measure abilities and capacities of our students tests such as ENLACE and PISA.
Before us stands a great challenge, but we must teach our students those thought abilities that will really help them succeed in the working world..
Tania