Two dramatic videos on ‘education’ + a bonus hilarious one!

I would like to share two videos today which I have watched many times before and I also showed to my students and colleagues to heat the debate on education. Therefore, I also wish to share them here on my blog so that you can watch and share your opinions about the videos as well, if, somehow, you have not seen them before.

The first video is by Sir Ken Robinson who is a person of admiration in terms of his thought-provoking ideas and talks. For his full bio, you can refer to Wikipedia or his website, and for his other videos you can also refer to TED.com by clicking on the related words. Briefly, this video discusses ‘education today’ and existing challenges and problems related to the current system, our students, market, teaching methods, and etc. Here is the TED quote for the video:

In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools’ dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.

The most striking two things in the video for me is the fact that we do not give sufficient thought to the big picture of education and do not reflect much on what we are already doing with the power in our hands. Secondly, the possibility of the first fact, mentioned in the previous sentence, decreasing our students’ creativity and ‘divergent thinking’ since we struggle to standardize them through tests and other stuff. For this situation, the Finnish case can give some ideas to reflect more. Through the Finnish case link, you can access to 3 more videos showing a BBC report on the success of Finland in education.

The second video, I have played many times in my class, is another popular and well-known video showing things mentioned by Sir Ken Robinson from students’ perspective in an extremely dramatic way. The facts are written on boards, signs, even walls and posters held by students with a really thoughtful and sad face, which might easily help the audience sympathize with those students. Here is the short video and related video info published below:

a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

Two videos to help you reflect on your classroom activities, experiments as a teacher; what to expect from teachers and institutions as a students, how to evaluate existing system and what to do as a parent, maybe. I have shared the videos since I though they are really thought-provoking and have always made me question my teaching and learning experience so far. As said above, you can also use those videos in class to guide and motivate your students to discuss on the topic ‘education’. I actually did it many times and I remember spending almost an hour discussing about the second video with my dear intermediate students repeating the same class a few times.

In fact there is no need to be pessimistic; I am sure and I know there are also creativity, innovation, divergent thinking, art, literature, real-life things going on in our classes around the world, and these videos might only help us ‘to think’, which we need a lot in teaching in this technologic era.

Finally, as an example of what is already going on in our classes and to boost your mood on a Sunday, I want to share one bonus video which displays a creative teacher integrating technology into his class to amaze students. Here is the video: if you somehow have not seen it before, I guarantee a ‘wide open mouth’ while watching the video.

Thank you for reading and watching!