For my first weekly reflection I wanted to do it on the film “Most Likely To Succeed”. I first want to summarize the key points from the film…
Larry Rosenstock is the founder of High Tech High. He created a school that was based off the belief that if a child is interested in something they will want to learn other things that may increase their ability or understanding of the thing they are interested in. An example he gives in the film is on how in his wood working class he noticed his students were willing to learn geometry as it helped them make more stable and functional furniture (00:17:10 Whiteley). He also has a strong understanding and belief that everyone learns in different ways, based off of his own experience studying for the law bar in an unconventional way. Larry established High Tech High with no bells, no written exams, classes aren’t divided into subjects and teachers are brought in on yearly contracts to teach what they are passionate about. This means that teachers have freedom to choose subjects and subject matter that goes beyond the standard curriculum that’s traditionally required. Within each class and the teachers chosen subject matter their is a high emphasis on soft skills such as time management, work ethic, collaboration, confidence building and learning how to deliver as well as recieve feedback. The improvement of these skills are essentially the core mission of the school, creating a group of learners that develop skills instead of retaining information.
What I found most interesting and relevent to today with High Tech High was the acknowledgment and awareness to how artificial intelligence is going to impact our future generations. They had a couple different reasonings for why soft skills are important but what I took from the film was that these human skills are hard to replicate with artificial intelligence. We already see many careers being taken over by AI but the careers that require human compassion, empathy, collaboration and compassion will be very hard to replace with anything other than a human that posseses those skills. The ability to retain information is not as valued as it was in the past due to the fact that we have an unlimited amount of resources and information at our fingertips. We have been learning in history how education has adapted and changed based off of the societal needs at the time, as future teachers we are in a really interesting time where education needs to be transformed in a way to set our future generations up for success, and High Tech High is a great example of this.
With this being said I do think that tradional course content does have a place in education. I believe that it’s imporatant students are educated on all subjects like social studies, math, sciences and the arts as I believe this can help create well rounded individuals. However I do believe that instead of trying to understand every single part of a subject and play a memory game just for a test, it would be more interesting to allow students to understand some main points of the content with the goal to then create a collaborative project based off of something they find interesting that’s either within or relative to the content. An idea I thought would be interesting is if you were teaching a high school math class, your class project could be to code an app which would require some basic understanding of mathematical equations. This could also be done with younger years through access to various different platforms that allow for app building. With this group project in mind it makes the content being learned much more interesting and engaging for the learners and they end up walking away with a tangible item that they worked months to build.
I believe their is space for both traditional and modern education to exist cohesively in our schools, but its important to recongnize the many ways that children learn. We already see many schools implimenting this but it may be time to veer away from traditional testing and lean more into the types of projects and ideas that will develop human skills talked about in the documentary.