How To Learn? From A Mistake

How To Learn? From A Mistake

Diana Laufenberg has been teaching for a long time and she has acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning and potential of students. She told when she was a kid she had a set of encyclopedias at her house, It was purchased the year she was born and it was extraordinary because she did not have to wait to go to the library to get the information.

When she started teaching, right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, she takes off from Wisconsin and moves to Kansas, where she was teaching her favorite subject, American government.  Kids in the 12th grade: not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system. Year two: learned a few things had to change her tactic and she puts in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves. She didn't tell them what to do or how to do it. They invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well and really had this robust experiential learning. The older teachers more experienced.

She teaches at the Science Leadership Academy, which is a partnership school between the Franklin Institute and the school district of Philadelphia. We are a nine through 12 public schools but there do school quite differently. she moved there primarily to be part of a learning environment that validated the way that she knew that kids learned and that really wanted to investigate what was possible when they are willing to let go of some of the paradigms of the past of information scarcity when her grandmother was in school and when her father was in school and even when she was in school and to a moment when we have information surplus. We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice tests. She told, this is just sharing, it is not learning.

In the last of speech, she concludes, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student's voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark and everything that everybody is talking about today, isn't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities, because we won't get there with a standardized test and we won't get there with a culture of one right answer. We know how to do this better and it's time to do better.