The Surprising Truth About Learning in Schools | Will Richardson | TEDxWestVancouverED

We know how to help kids develop into powerful learners. Now, we just need to make that happen in schools.

"A parent of two teen-agers, Will Richardson has spent the last dozen years developing an international reputation as a leading thinker and writer about the intersection of social online learning networks and education.

Will has authored four books (with two more on the way), including ""Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information are Everywhere"" (September, 2012) published by TED books and based on his 2013 TEDx talk in Melbourne, Australia. ""Why School?"" is now the #1 best-selling TED book ever.


Will lives in rural New Jersey with his wife Wendy and his kids Tess and Tucker."

[gylxqdo]

Its very crazy how when you are bad at math or science people say try and work harder. But when you're bad at art people just say it's not your thing

[srbabaie]

In 8th grade i had a teacher who believed this and he did not teach like any of the other teachers.. he made class exciting and he treated us like humans not robots he made sure everyone was okay when they walked in and he was honest and taught life experiences and everyone loved that teacher but he kept on getting in trouble with the school system because he would talk about the reality of the real world and to think for yourself so sometimes in class another teacher would stand in the back of the class to make sure he would not get off topic... he was the only teacher i have ever had so far that was so raw and spoke truth.

[TheInterestingInformer]

Schools were meant to make us factory workers (no joke)

[melodi]

It always gets me when people say "I took 4 years of Spanish in high school and all I remember is 'hola'"

[shellysangrey]

Amen! I'm a homeschool blogger and vlogger, and I address this all the time because even homeschooling parents can have so much difficulty thinking outside the box.

[deathstar]

This is a great video. I am 16 and I completely agree. Why shouldn't we be able to learn what we want and what interests us? I think it's ridiculous. The U.S. Education system has got to change. And I hope it does. Not just for me and my friends sakes, but for everyone and the future generations. This is a great start to changing it. Thank you for inspiring me and my friends.

[OG]

THE WAY WE'RE TAUGHT IS WE ARE TAUGHT TO BE "HELPLESS" AND DEPENDENT.
THE THOUGHT KEPT COMING BACK TO ME THAT AS KIDS WE WEREN’T TAUGHT THE RIGHT THINGS TO BE INDEPENDENT.
WE WERE TAUGHT THINGS TO BE INTERDEPENDENT AND NOT SELF-SUFFICIENT BUT RELIANT ON THE SYSTEM.
COMMON SENSE, TELLS US IT IS THE NATURAL THING IN LIFE TO BE SELF-SUSTAINING AND INDEPENDENT. SO I CAME UP WITH SOME BASIC REFORMULATION OF WHAT COULD BE TAUGHT IN OUR SCHOOLS TO IMPROVE THIS SITUATION:


Teach 1st to 4th Grades:

1.) Reading

2.) Writing

3.) Math

4.) History

5.) Science
6.) Religion

TEACH 5thT TO 8TH GRADES

1.) How to grow a garden and preserve food;

2.) Emergency survival methods/what foods are nutritious;

3.) Home: How to cook nutritious meals.

4.) Prayer and Meditation.

5.) Psychology (Transactional Analysis);

6.) Martial Arts and/or Tai Chi
7.) Religion

HIGH SCHOOL 9 TO 12 Grades:

1.) Electronics and Welding

2.) Home Repairs

3.) Generating Solar Power & other Renewable Energy Sources

4.) How to cook nutritious meals;

5.) How to do mechanical work on cars and small engines;

6.) How to build structures from blueprints.

7.) Identifying edible and poisonous wild plants;

8.) How to grow food gardens and gardens to purify soil and water.
9.) Metaphysics.

IF WE ALL LEARNED THESE THINGS, WE WOULD BE MUCH BETTER OFF.

THE SYSTEM NOW HAS US DEPENDING ON EVERYONE ELSE AND NOT OURSELVES.

WE NEED TO ALL LEARN TO SUPPORT OURSELVES AS IT WILL SOLVE ALL THE PROBLEMS IN THE CITY AND COMMUNITIES.

PEOPLE COULD MOVE AND LIVE ANYWHERE AS WE WOULD ALL BE SELF-SUSTAINING.

College:

Specialty Courses such as they teach nowadays are for college. Academic courses.

It’s the BASICS that need to be taught, so people will no longer be helpless!

PEOPLE CAN TAKE WHATEVER COURSES THEY WANT IN COLLEGE.

[MultilingualPolyglot]

I'm a teacher and I completely agree with this. My students get very good results because I'm using a different method, but still parents ask me why I'm not following a book, very sad that they care more about the book than about the results. Incredible!

[drkayotu]

When you ask adults how "they" learn, they come up with consistent set of reasonable answers. If you ask them how "students" should learn, I suspect the answer would be different. We even have a separate field of study devoted to "Adult Learning". For some reason, the rules change for adults. I don't think this should be the case. If we treated children as adults with respect to learning, applied the principles that we would apply to ourselves and to adults, we would be in a far better situation in school with respect to learning. Imagine telling an adult, an adult, that you are going to teach them Calculus or Physics or something they have no interest in whatsoever - You might even try to sell it to them by saying it will be good for them later in life. I am pretty sure most of us would say - "Thanks, but not interested". Students in K-12 don't have that option and it is a serious problem.

[rosannahF]

Best Ted talk on education I've seen! Sadly only a small number of people actually have the power to change it

[codetyrese]

Answer: Abandon your formal education and follow your curiosity

[RichardKant]

I am a Primary School Teacher (2 years of FT Teaching) and your presentation makes so much sense and I literally shook and had my emotions affected just watching this. This video was published in 2015 and here we are in 2019 and that disconnect remains. I have been trying so hard the last two years to make changes to align my Music Classes to 21st Century Teaching. My Music Units are embedded with the core learning about how we learn (strategies on how to learn that are based on brain research). At the moment I have depression, anxiety and taken 10 weeks off (Leave without pay) to because became physically sick. I had the commitment, courage, passion, interest, energy to make the changes when you get knocked down many times, each time takes longer to get back up. I don't blame any of my colleagues or anyone in the situation I am in. We are all just showing symptoms of this disconnect and the stress of teaching and having so many other extra roles and responsibilities to manage makes us say and do some crazy things.

[dianepedrupillai]

This video reminds me of my teachers from grades 1 - 3 who let us explore and not retain information. I completely agree with the video; I've had students make the same suggestions while teaching in class. When I think about learning in general, I always think that as students get older their education becomes less engaging because that is how the content is designed to be. At this point what do teachers do? How can teachers make the content interesting if it is not relatable to a student's life if they are not interested in learning the topic? Doesn't this mean that the entire education system needs to change? Why do we have such a system in the first place?

[agayfurry]

I've asked my parents if I could be home schooled because of all the anxiety and worries I get in school. They said they'll think about it and I hope they agree to do that because I get insane amounts of pressure put on me and getting yelled at by my teacher.

[judyyero]

Will, you're preaching to the choir here. I just drove 9, 000 miles around the United States visiting learner-centered schools, such as Renaissance Schools of Arts and Sciences in Portland, Oregon and Rainbow Community School in Asheville, North Carolina. There are hundreds more learner-centered schools in the U.S. alone. The vast majority of these schools are independent, meaning that one has to have the means to pay tuition to attend them. Clearly, the U.S. Secretary of Education is aware of these schools because he sends his own kids to the University of Chicago lab school, which was founded by John Dewey.

The true "elephant in the room" that no one seems to want to discuss is the historical and current "mission" of compulsory public education in America. Until we change that mission from turning out worker bees to "successfully compete in the global economy" (the Mission statement of the U.S.DOE) to facilitating the development of individuals in the very ways you have listed, we're not going to see a meaningful change. This is going to take a 180 degree shift in the purpose of public education--from everyone "knowing and being able to do the same thing at the same age" to helping individuals develop their own unique potential. The goals aren't mutually exclusive. People who become self-directed, lifelong learners are the greatest hope for the economy. They may also be more difficult to govern because they tend to ask questions.

Our educational policy makers clearly know that learner-centered schools foster the development of independent, responsible, creative, socially aware human beings. That's why they send their own kids to these schools. So if they know that, why don't they implement the same approaches in public schools? Why isn't learner-centered education available to ALL children in this country, rather than just those from families who can afford to pay for it? Why, in fact, do they continue to force schools even farther to the side of the "what doesn't work" column?

If we don't turn the spotlight on those inequities...if we don't ask the hard questions about the purpose of public schools and who that purpose serves, we might as well accept the inevitable. Public education has been tremendously successful in creating whole generations who have learned to do what they were told. People who have never been given the opportunity to discover how their actions can affect the world. People who have come to believe that, whatever the problem, someone else will take care of it. So now, we have a society that is far more concerned with the Kardashians than they are with global warming....people who feel they've done their civic duty if they go on Facebook and say, "Oh, isn't that awful."

Do we know how to create the conditions in which children become powerful learners? Absolutely. Will it happen in public schools? That's the big question.

[iloveyoumadhuri]

You know what's funny but sad, there may be high school teachers who use TEDTalks for their students but won't watch this for their own benefit.

[rijanbahadurpradhan]

I forgot what i learned yesterday at school...

[mariammoutaoukil]

I had a teacher in grade 2. back in 1999 that I will remember forever because she taught us in the way this video discusses. We were encouraged to think for ourselves and our classes were the furthest from traditional. She made learning fun, and I always wished that I could be that same type of teacher to my future students. It's been hard though because school administrations' worst offense is veering off the set path. I had to struggle for the tiniest bit of wiggle room at the schools I've taught in, to the point where I gave up. I would love to work at a school where traditional methods of learning are extinct.

[atlet]

Yeees! This is how learning should be. When I worked as a teacher, my first thought was: Who have taken away the curiosity from the kids?

[pjteched]

The discussion around "changing the narrative of school" at about the 9:00 minute mark is striking because I think using narrative can be a strong overarching foundation for a curriculum in its own right. Using narrative as the impetus to learn might be a way to implement a range of pedagogical elements educators discuss but might find incongruous with curriculum. One example of how we might create a narrative across subject matter and make learning more meaningful and engaging is through wearable smart devices. These technologies can be used by students to track body data (e.g., in physical education class) and bring that data to a math class to learn graphing, or coding smart devices to record specific body data metrics of interest defined by individual students. This example illustrates how something as commonplace as an activity tracking device can be used to create a narrative for students across subjects over the course of a single day, or even a year. The point is getting creative with the tools available to promote a student centered curriculum premised on developing a narrative between learning activities, subjects, and experiences.