Printer-friendly versionEsther Wojcicki is chair of the Creative Commons Board of Directors, head of the Palo Alto High School Journalism Program, a consultant to Google, and an education blogger for the Huffington Post. She says that engaging students and empowering teachers is the key to needed innovation in American education.
An Innovation Agenda for Learning
In late November, at a meeting sponsored by The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation held at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, some 25 education innovators, policy makers and developers talked about what a new era of innovation in education would look like and what it would take to jump start this kind of agenda.
I think Esther made some great points regarding changes that need to be made in order to get kids excited about learning again. I appreciate her approach that before anything will change we need to reach the school boards. Too often school boards maintain the traditional approach, which means "no change", when change is something we need, especially when the statistics show we have the largest dropout rate in the history of public education.
There is a direct correlation between the dropout rates and the way kids view the relevance of the curriculum that is placed before them. Students need to have more control over their learning and until we make the move to more project based learning we will have a difficult time engaging students, and thus a more difficult time improving student achievement.
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