Dear colleague,
I'm switching it up today by basically saying one thing: read this Blake Harvard article.
Let me give you some context:
- I first came across Blake a couple years ago. He reminded me of my own tendencies: consistent blog articles, focused topics, written by a practicing teacher.
- Blake's book, Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning, came out last year. It's excellent. In it, Blake unpacks Dr. Stephen Chew's Choke Points and Pitfalls in Learning diagram. (I blogged through that diagram in this series a few years ago, and I make liberal use of Chew's diagram in the Principles of Learning Course.)
- And finally, I'm asking you to read this article from Blake today because he makes some essential points, such as:
- “Strangely enough, it sometimes feels like what is lost in many supposed leaps forward in education is the basics of learning. From a cognitive perspective, we're being pushed away from what works in order to prepare students for ‘work that doesn't exist yet.' Which, if you think about it, doesn't make any sense at all. If we don't know of the work our students will be doing when they are out in the workforce, then how can we predict that we're not preparing them for that unknown world? And how do we know what we should do to prepare them?”
- “If we look [at job market predictions from the World Economic Forum], we see that reading, writing, and mathematics are predicted to be ‘out of focus' in 2030; they are less essential now and not expected to increase in use. Wait…what? How it the world will the ability to read and write and perform mathematical computations be less essential? Is there anything more basic than knowing how to read and write and math? How will students even begin to build upon a basic understanding of subject matter and foundational knowledge if they're less likely to be able to read and write and math? And if society seemingly won't need workers to be literate, how in the world can we expect those same workers to be fulfill the predicted increased need in creativity? You cannot be creative with information you don't have. There's got to be some understanding and memory of a topic in order to successfully create from that subject.”
So it's not a long article (love it), but it's packed with wisdom. That's basically the goal here in DSJ Land, but I can't make the points Blake makes any better than he does.
Here's the article one more time in case you weren't convinced earlier. 🙂
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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