My Reflection on Current Pedagogical Priorities.

My current milieu has definitely challenged my misconceptions and transformed my perspective on the values of 21st century education ideology. It led me to the belief that “Learning is simultaneously creative and responsive to the constraints and circumstances of the context around one” (Grobstein & Lesnick, 2011a, p.11). Thus, Tony Wagner (n.d) insists:

“The world no longer cares how much you know, because Google knows everything. There is no longer a competitive advantage in knowing more than the person next to you because what the world cares most about is not what you know, but what you can do with what you know... In other words, we need creative minds in this innovation era” (as cited in Sawyer, 2019, p.VII).

This reflects the findings of the new science of learning, which emphasizes the central importance of divergent thinking to human innovation, where novel ways of looking at the world create new opportunities. After which convergent modes of thought are able to execute on this potential through the precise application of known methodologies. But enough creative freedom must be left for continual experimentation, even though costly failure is an inseparable component of creative success.

This conceptual view of the nature of human learning and behavior posits that our cognitive domains such as attention, memory, problem-solving, social cognition, motivation, retention, etc…(Schunk, 2012) are distinctive from other creatures due to the non-linear, curiosity-driven dynamics of the human brain. The divergent domain has been studied in the fields of neuroscience and psychology and is deemed to be more essential than ever for modern education.

Lieberman (2012) explains that there are nearly 20,000 classroom hours that students in the U.S will spend throughout their K-12 education. And that the general public believes that the longer we stay in school, the more knowledge we will gain, academically as well as socially. However, many studies have proved that the opposite is true. In fact, “only a small fraction of what is learned in the classroom is retained even a year after learning” (Lieberman, 2012, p.3). This finding of retention provoked me on my personal level while working in the U.S public education because many public schools’ stated intention is to ensure that students are prepared for the world that has yet to be created. But much of the curriculum is geared toward rewarding memorization, spit out in rather confined worksheets and tests.