Many of you know that I was working with an amazing group of teachers last year who were passionate about changing how we DO school. They are champions around the ideas that Kristin just wrote about: getting kids to THINK, They are committed to connecting thinking; not 7 hours of classes that have no connection, but rather HOW CAN WE CHANGE this. These people are STILL committed to this way of thinking, and we STILL have dreams of how to make this happen.
While this book, The Smartest Kids in the World, may have it's flaws, this book truly inspired me--and many others who read it with me. There ARE people out there who are WILLING to make this leap, who are EXCITED to change the way things are done. We just have to make it happen!!
Here is from Amanda Ripley's website:
The Smartest Kids in the World
A New York Times bestseller, The Smartest Kids was selected by The Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Amazon.com as one of the most notable books of 2013.
In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words. What is it like to be a child in these new education superpowers?
In a global quest to find answers for our own children, author and Time journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embedded in these countries for one year. Kim, 15, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, 18, exchanges an upscale Minnesota suburb for a booming South Korean city; and Tom, 17, leaves a historic Pennsylvania village for a gritty city in Poland.
Their stories, along with groundbreaking research into what works worldwide, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these places had many “smart” kids a few decades ago. They had changed. Teaching had become more serious; parents had focused on what mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education. A reporting tour de force, The Smartest Kids is a book about building resilience in a new world—as told by the young Americans with the most at stake.
No comments:
Post a Comment