Dear all,
Hope you had a good week. It has certainly been busy with SISAC Cross- country, track and field and Safer Recruiting with Safeguarding level 3. Also we have had the opportunity to show off our school to Matthias a Cognita Head of School from Brazil, Ralph the Cognita Board Chair and of course our new administrators, Tania, Teresa and Brad who will be joining us next year.
Everyone is agreed that our world has been changing extremely quickly in the last 20 years with the onset of the world wide web and dramatic developments in technology. These changes have made the future far more difficult to predict and this alone has merited a reflection upon the objectives of education and the pedagogy we use in schools. We have raced through the knowledge and information revolutions and are now facing the challenges of educating students through concepts and skills. For 200 years education has been producing either employees for an industrial world or office workers for the services that support industry.This system has been successful because of the predictability of the future. However, this is no longer the case and we are waking up to the realization that education and schools are failing many children. It is not only the world that has changed but so have the children we teach. We have seen Generation x and Y pass ing through school and into adulthood and are now being challenged by Generation Z. Each one displaying different characteristics, having different motivations and demanding different stimuli to engage them. Hence schools need missions and visions that are practical, flexible and take into account uncertainty and dramatic change. Recent events in both the UK and the USA have taken many by surprise and may have triggered a movement that will further challenge our view of the future.
Hence this Food for Thought that is a bit different.I believe it is a good moment, in a year of reflecting about who we are, to look at who we are and who are students are becoming against the back drop of post Brexit and USA elections. It is hard to identity what is happening and what the consequences will be. But as teachers I believe we need to be thinking about these political events against the context of our mission and vision.
Having just watched this TED Dialogue about Nationalism v's Globalism, I decided that it would be a good idea to encourage all of you to also watch it. I believe this conversation is incredibly relevant to all of us educators as we strive to predict where we are going in the future. You will hear interesting perspectives on statistics of today; about how positive our present story is; the challenges that have caused today's political upheaval: the potential lack of jobs in the future due to artificial intelligence; the need for a focused search for reality; a need for understanding our own identity; the ability to discern truth and about how important our communities are to us. My hope is to have us all reflect upon the points being made by Yuval Harari in relation to us as educators at ISHCMC and our movement to disrupt education and redefine the school experience. On Monday, in our briefing, I will give you 5 minutes to express your thoughts to a colleague about the points emerging from this conversation, where we are going as a school and whether you feel ISHCMC is allowing you as a teacher to help students develop in a manner that will allow them to flourish in whatever the future world looks like.
The dialogue is longer than my usual posting; it lasts an hour. However, it is very engaging and will empower you to discuss with students when they ask you about what is happening with politics today. It also breaks down into an introduction set of questions between Chris Anderson and Yuval Harari which lasts about 25 minutes on the overall theme of what is happening in politics today and why, and it then moves into separate questions which you can pick and choose from or watch in shorter snippets.
I know you will certainly find plenty of food for thought.
See you on Monday,
Have a good weekend,
Yours
Adrian
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