In 2011 when my family and I started a nonprofit to help provide meaningful professional development for teachers, we were trying to find a great Key Note speaker. My mom came across Sir Ken Robinson and thought he stood for everything we were trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, he was significantly beyond our price tag!! Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear Sir Ken Robinson speak and it brought back why we started Teaching Beyond Textbooks and the importance of transforming what education looks like today.
Here are just a few of the lessons I took away from his talk…
- Heart of education is the relationship with the teacher and the learner!
- Against standardization, not standards
- Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.
- Humans have the power of imagination. Creativity is putting imagination to work (have to be doing something) and Innovation is putting good ideas to work.
- Teachers help students discover inner talents, find their passions and then refine them.
I can understand each of these statements, but they all offer a lot to unpack and learn when we apply them to our classrooms. I do WONDER if in the chaos of planning lessons, grading, parent emails, test scores, student behavior, etc. – if we actually spend enough time thinking about these critical components of teaching. We KNOW that we live in a different world today, but do we actually teach differently?
One of his last points was to Create a CLIMATE of POSSIBILITY!
Stop worrying if we get to each mini lesson in your unit of study, if students had their allotted “reading” and “math” time and focus on creating opportunities for students to see the possibilities! It is harder to step out into this unknown world of facilitating possibilities and opportunities. It is easier to rely on old habits and teach like we have always taught, but we are deeply missing out on discovering students’ talents, nurturing them and allowing them to change the world. As teachers we NEED to TAKE a RISK and break free from our TEACHING HABITS to make a difference in this 21st century world.
Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted Talks are worth a listen.