Edu Change & Student Advocacy

 .    My educational pedagogy has always been based on the constant attempt to look at every educational experience through a student’s perspective. It could stem from my early background as journalism/media professional or from my lifetime interest in advocacy.      Naturally, I think far too often educators have not looked at things in terms of student impact or perspective when implementing lessons, activities, programs or even pedagogy.      And now, at a time when the world of work and education are changing so dramatically, I am forced once again to ask what are we doing in our educational system designs that are considering student perspective, student interest, student voice, student choice, student impact and more?      Essentially, are things as crucial as educational technology, web access, use of social media, real college and career opportunities, mentoring, job shadowing, individual students interests thing...

     As a student, and certainly as an educator, I have continually strived to be a lifelong learner. One of the few advantages of getting older is the realization that one can and should continue to learn.      And as an educator who has focused more in the recent years in the inherent value of learning and what influences it, I have done lots of analysis on the concepts of change, reflection and risk-taking. For the sake of this writing, let’s take the concept of risk and its ultimate impact and influence on one’s actual learning.       This has become more important lately as we move more towards Ed tech integration, project-based approaches and more real world challenges. Solving real world problems and applying our learning to project-based challenges will always require a certain level of risk. We risk our untested ideas, our creativity, challenges from working in various teams and groups, evaluation and assessment and mor...

     One of the more common goals/challenges that emerges regularly in education is the subject of relevance. Relevance is the idea of connecting learning to things that matter. And we know what matters to all of us are things that we can see, connect and apply. It’s what’s real right?      With that in mind, how do we work to create learning experiences that are ‘real’ for all students? Well, this is challenging in that we have created entire systems of learning that are really built on artificial foundations vs. real ones.      As an example, our entire idea of the classroom is predicated on something that is really not real world or real – at least certainly not any longer. The set-up of the classroom - with students at desks or seats and a teacher at the front dispensing knowledge and instruction - comes from a time when information was in the hands of a few experts, while workers or employees worked in factories or facto...