onlinelearning

The Achievement Gap Will Grow

Posted by Dean Shareski on in facebook, Leadership, linkedin, onlinelearning 1 Comment

This post was last updated on 10 months ago at 10 months ago

I had some thoughts on it a while back but in the light of our world today and my most recent post I think it’s worth acknowledging further. While the recent post was intended to shed light on the opportunities that exist, I did address briefly the equity issue but wanted to expand a little on that idea.

I’ve never been a big fan of the term achievement when it comes to learning. It seems like a term that invokes competition and constant goal setting. Not that those can’t be useful perspectives but it makes learning sound like a mountain to climb rather than an environment to live in.

Equity has become an increasingly important conversation in education. Whether it’s economic, physical, racial, cognitive or other, education has equity problems. Physical classrooms and spaces can address some of these but now with all our students at home, the differences among our students are fully amplified. Classrooms and schools while certainly far from perfect do many things to give all students opportunities to learn and grow. Teachers in general work hard and have some influence in addressing gaps … Read the rest

This Is The Time

Posted by Dean Shareski on in facebook, onlinelearning, professional learning 3 Comments

This post was last updated on 10 months ago at 10 months ago

The spread of the Coronavirus is one of the most challenging things to happen to us as a society in a few generations, but it very well could turn out to be the best thing to happen to education in 100 years. While that’s a very difficult idea to process at the moment, looking ahead this could be a true turning point in education.

If you look back at education over the past 20, 30 or even 50 years there doesn’t seem to be any substantive shifts in the overall structures of learning, however, significant pressures on the system have become apparent: the pressures and ineffectiveness of standardized testing, the lack of relevance and boredom of students, the constraints of time, systemic inequities that negatively impact marginalized populations.  All of these things are being exposed today and recognized as major problems with our system. We’re constantly looking for examples that buck these trends and trying desperately in many cases to change education en mass. While to the greater public this is a relatively new discussion, I’ve been on this journey my whole life.

My life in education … Read the rest