Wednesday, July 29, 2009

notes from today...

i found myself scribbling ideas from today's patterns of thinking workshop that i wanted to be able to mull over later. here's some general snippets of what we talked about... some are general quotes, some are actual quotes, but since i was writing fast i'm sure i missed pieces. my apologizes to the thinkworks team if i'm way off here...

knowledge = product

thinking= process and is therefore invisible.

however, the two are married and inseparable, despite the fact that in schools we are primarily focused on giving knowledge like an ATM machine- you put in knowledge and you can check to be sure of your knowledge balance by giving a test. quick and easy.

educational world doesn't currently act as though we know how knowledge works
BUT
while we are trying to only give knowledge, advertisers and politicians are using the newest and the best research in cognitive science to get into our brains.
therefore,
we can teach our kids to think, or someone will do it for them.

no matter what we do, children are building knowledge, recognizing patterns and using the patterns of thinking.

we need to teach a balance of knowledge and thinking in order for our children to be successful. in 1900 8 out of 10 jobs were industrial but in 2000 2 out of 10 jobs are industrial. in 1900s we needed to use the laws of physics in order to be successful in that job field. today we have to change the skill sets we teach to give our children successful tools in the future.

this is just scratching the surface of everything we touched on today and everything racing through my mind. i'm sure i'll be revisiting these thoughts in the next few weeks, but if you're curious check out thinkandthrive.com and their videos- they explain it better than i can!

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