Education Questions of the Day

Respond to each of the questions below. Identify how your teaching practice could shift to contribute to a Living School. 

1. What is the best use of face-to-face time with my students?
2. How does the content that I am teaching and my pedagogy contribute to or detract from well-being for all? What further steps could I take?
3. How does the content that I am teaching and my pedagogy facilitate student growth as:
   1. choice-makers, and as
   2. change-makers?

​The above questions are from O'Brien, Catherine. Education for Sustainable Happiness and Well-Being (p. 203). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

I recommend watching the following TED video from Sal Khan in conjunction with thinking about the above questions and paying particular attention to Khan’s closing remarks:

And this isn't even just a "nice to have." I think it's a social imperative. We're exiting what you could call the industrial age and we're going into this information revolution. And it's clear that some things are happening. In the industrial age, society was a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, you needed human labor. In the middle of the pyramid, you had an information processing, a bureaucracy class, and at the top of the pyramid, you had your owners of capital and your entrepreneurs and your creative class. But we know what's happening already, as we go into this information revolution. The bottom of that pyramid, automation, is going to take over. Even that middle tier, information processing, that's what computers are good at.

So as a society, we have a question: All this new productivity is happening because of this technology,but who participates in it? Is it just going to be that very top of the pyramid, in which case, what does everyone else do? How do they operate? Or do we do something that's more aspirational? Do we actually attempt to invert the pyramid, where you have a large creative class, where almost everyone can participate as an entrepreneur, an artist, as a researcher?