RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

An interesting way to look at the opportunity we face in changing the public education archetype from industry thought leader, Sir Ken Robinson.  This video does a great job of staging the challenge in a social/historical context, and there are several creative folks working on practical solutions.  For a good example (and another neat video), check out the team at New Classrooms. 

Howard Dean and Joe Scarborough discuss teacher's unions

Above, I've linked to a contentious exchange on teacher's unions and the politics surrounding their role in reforming education.  This has been, and continues to be, at the heart of much of our dialogue surrounding key reform roadblocks such as compensating great teacher performance.  It's often a lightning rod topic as teachers sometimes feel their motivations are under attack and political purists tend to corrupt the entire discussion.  This was also a key theme in the critically acclaimed 2010, movie 'Waiting for Superman.'

Welcome to iCultivatEd!  

We are living in very exciting times - change is sweeping across the globe in all its many forms, and the flattening effects of technology are helping to transform social institutions across nearly every aspect of our daily lives.  One particular area of transformation that has grabbed our national attention over the past decade is education reform.  Everyone knows the system's broken, but few can agree on how we ought to fix it.

Having been introduced to the education profession myself, at this very time of upheaval, is both tremendously exciting and overwhelmingly confusing. Teacher's unions, school boards, compensation programs, teaching colleges, text books, behavior and discipline programs, standardized testing, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and all levels of the federal, state and district administration are under attack. Fingers are pointing in every direction. Again, everyone knows that public education needs to be reinvented to meet the needs of today's children and the unique challenges they will face, but there is very, very little consensus on how we get it done.  

The good news... we are on the leading edge of an education revolution and there are hundreds of thousands of dedicated professionals who are committed to making this work.  I know this first hand from working with talented men and women everyday who are building a new foundation for the future of public instruction.  I will be using this blog to share some of the best and worst of what I see going on in our national conversation, and to offer some personal dispatches from the front lines of education reform.

Thank you for following, and feel free to join the conversation by sharing your thoughts.

-Sarah