I'm
not sure exactly what I was expecting from the Summit meeting
but not anything from the students as polished as what was presented.
I think it is the cynicism of more than thirty years of teaching,
where students have rarely had opportunities to excel such as
this.
I have worked hard over the past several years to promote and support the development of distance learning in the classroom. As the world has grown smaller through the development of communication systems and advances in technology, the possibilities for students have grown correspondingly larger. I visited my old high school last April--El Segundo High School--just before embarking on a trip to Washington DC. It is just on the edge of LA International.
Remarkably, though
it has been more than 35 years since I graduated, it looked little
different from the school which I teach at now, and many, if
not most, of the core teaching practices have changed little
over these years. walk past most any of the classrooms today
will take me by teachers standing in front of their students,
talking heads, the students expected to take it all in and spit
it back on the next test or quiz.
But this is changing: the classroom may similar, even a decade from now, but the wires of change are a coming and the student summit teams which made these great presentations tonight are on the curling crest of that change. Welcome to the new student model for the 21st Century.
