What Really Matters 2

What Really Matters 2.

Traditional education revolves around the three Rs.

No, not reading riting and rithmatic as was the case when I was at school, but Repeat, Remember, Regurgitate.

We all remember those Maths classes when the teacher would show us a problem on the board (usually a chalk-smeared blackboard), we would do the next 40 problems from the text book (all similar), another 20 for homework. Then at the end of the section, we would be given a test of another 40 almost identical problems with which we were expected to score more than 90%.

The fact of the matter is that most educational systems were designed this way. Real life was divided in to artificial domains or subject areas. Tests were devised that allowed for the “brightest” (and by that we mean “best at remembering”) to succeed and for the rest to fail.

Teachers possessed the “knowledge”, they passed it on to the students in the order and manner they felt fit, the students remembered the knowledge and then regurgitated it on tests. The best students at this process, progressed, the others did not. The more cynical among is might suggest that the old fashioned system of forcing students to Repeat, Remember, Regurgitate was considered a good way to discipline the young. It certainly put the teacher in a position of power in the classroom.

Fortunately modern brain and pedagogical research shows us how children think and learn best – and it’s not by the three Rs!

In the best educational systems, the old fashioned, knowledge based approach is replaced by skills based, contextual learning. In such systems the teacher is no longer the fount of all knowledge, but the facilitator helping each individual student to acquire the skills and concepts necessary to understand, to think, to adapt, to analyze and to do.

This is the underlying philosophy of the International Baccalaureate Organisation. Whether the PYP, MYP or DP programme, IB students are empowered to think and to do rather than to just know.

I think therefore IB

Andrew Derry