Follow Your Dreams: A constructivist goal

 I am a big believer in the old saying, "follow your dreams."  We tell our own children that they should have some ambition in life and they should pursue those ambitions throughout their lives.  We tell our children to be yourself, to find yourself, to be the best that you can be.  We encourage our children to think positive about their future, work hard to accomplish your goals, and never give up.  We tell them to keep on going, no matter what.

We tell our own children to follow their dreams and as parents we are there to help them succeed.  This is a great message for every child and adult and this is a message we hear over and over again in the media.  We see examples of people who have been successful and they tell us that we can also achieve our dreams if we keep trying.  We are told that we can obtain our goals and we believe it.  In reality, not everyone can win the gold medal and not everyone will get the money and personal benefits of being super successful.  But, it is good to have a positive attitude about your own future, so that you don't give up.  We might not always be the winner but the game can still be fun.  

In our school system, we should also set educational goals for the children who are required to participate.  A major goal for all children should be to follow their dreams.  We want all children to have ambition and to have personal goals for their own lives.  We want to help them to be successful in meeting their goals in life.  However, presently the educational system does not encourage children to follow their dreams.  Instead, our system mandates the goals for students and discourages their dreams.  We tell them to do as they are told and we don't listen to them when it comes to the curriculum, instruction, and assessment we use in schools.  On the one side, we say you can follow your dreams, but then we don't give them any time or opportunity to do so.  We actually put up roadblocks for students so that they give up on their own dreams.  

A constructivist approach to education is a way for us to establish an educational system that is much more aligned with individual goals and dreams.  Students should be able to express themselves and their personal thoughts, feelings, and dreams about their future.  They should be involved with setting their own educational curriculum and with how they will meet their goals.  In a constructivist system, children with their parents and teachers establish their individual goals and how they will be successful in meeting those goals.  

So, a constructivist approach is the only one in which we help children to follow their dreams.  Let's change education so that we can become a nation of people who are following their dreams.  

Black Lives Matter

 I am so ashamed of so many White Americans who are still racist after so many years of Americans who have worked to make our country better, and now the big, bad racist pops his head back up.  What is happening in this administration is shameful for Whites and harmful to all Americans.  Racism is alive and still sick in America.  A free and democratic America has no place for racism of any kind.  

White Americans should all be ashamed.  Seriously!  How dare you believe you are better than anyone else?  What arrogance!  If you're not a racist, then stand up and peacefully protest, but protest like your own life depends upon it, or your children's lives.  We all have to stand up to injustice, police brutality, and racial discrimination.  There is only one way for us to react and that is non-violently.  When we react with violence, then we give them an excuse to use force, and we don't want an armed confrontation.  That would just hurt everyone.  When millions of people protest non-violently, they take power and politicians will listen and change will happen.

We have all seen in our history how peaceful protest can be extremely effective in making change occur.  But we have to be persistent and we have to stay focused on our goal of justice and equality for all.  Black lives matter.  We should make that our national motto.  Every White American should say Black lives matter and apologize in the name of all Whites for the racists who make the rest of us look bad.  

I certainly do hope and pray that most Whites are not racist.  I hope it is only a minority of highly verbal and reactive White racists who are coming out of the woodwork when our administration urges them on.  We must use our collective outrage and get out there and protest and then get out and vote the racists out of office.  We can use our voices and our votes to end racism in America in this generation.  

Why freedom as a goal for education is so important

 The concept of freedom is quite simple in some ways.  We are free.  Period.  What else is there to say?   I do what I want.  You do what you want.  Simple.  But we all know it's not that simple of a concept.  Are we free to kill someone else?  That's not quite so simple either.  People do kill other people so they had the freedom to kill and they did.  It happens every day.  Someone will be killed by the freedom of someone else.  We are inherently free to do good or evil.  That certainly does not mean the rest of us can't do anything about someone who uses their freedom to hold us hostage, torture us, or kill us.  So the whole story goes that we are free but we need to live with others and allow others to be free or we could end up fighting to the death.  So we have to compromise with societal laws and norms that might discourage individual freedoms when it comes to infringing upon others' rights.  But where does it stop with laws?  When do they take away freedoms you should have just because others don't like what you're doing?  And so we try to compromise in our society and that's not so simple either.  

But I want to talk about the freedom of children and the concept of freedom in school.  I started talking about freedom for adults because children are going to be adults in our society in the next few years and the freedom of children should align with the freedom we give to adults.  Freedom for children becomes more complex than freedom for adults.  Adults can use their freedom and cheat, steal, and harm others.  Adults can do all kinds of evil and destructive things and the rest of us can try to control the harm they do.  These are adults who should know better.  These are adults who should have learned to control their selfish impulses and to live with others.  Children are also free and they need to learn how to use their freedom in life to survive and to be happy with others.  Freedom is a given but it is not easy to be free.  It is one of the hardest things in life - to be free.  Some people don't want to be free.  They would rather that someone makes decisions for them or for someone else to do things for them.  But then others can't stand for anyone to tell them what to do.  And this is all true with children.  Some children are so independent and stubborn that they want listen to a word you say.  They don't like it when the teacher makes them sit and listen.  They want to do it themselves and they can usually figure it out on their own.  Then there are children who won't do anything unless you tell them exactly what to do and give them complete orders throughout the day so they do not need to make any decisions.  They want the teacher to explain and go over and over content and they follow instructions about completing instructional tasks.

When I talk about freedom in school, I mean teaching children how to be free.  They are free.  But are they capable to handle their freedom?  To be a free adult, you need to take care of yourself completely.  You have to earn your own money.  You have to take care of all your personal life responsibilities.  You have to be self responsible in every aspect of your life.  You will also need to have personal skills to live with others and to respect their rights and freedoms.  Therefore, as a child you will need to learn a lot of life skills and other skills that will enable you to be an adult who is capable of living independently and peacefully in a society with others.

So I don't mean that you just turn children loose and let them be free to learn.  That's not freedom to learn.  For some children that would be a way for failure.  Every child, just like every adult, is different from every other child in many, many ways.  We should not create a curriculum for all children, but that is what we have done.  We also dictate the instruction children receive and we dictate when they learn, when they do each task throughout the day, and when they can even talk.  Schools presently are stripping freedom from our children.  Some adults would be OK with this, but not many.  Why should we treat our children in a way that we would not tolerate?  Why can't we recognize that we want adults to act responsibly but we have not taught them how to be free in school?  Children need to be in a constructivist school system that provides children a learning environment in which they are given as much freedom as possible with adult assistance and supervision.  Children need to learn skills in which they can take care of their personal well-being and they need to learn many other skills they will need to become self-directed and self-responsible.  But children need a lot of help in learning these skills.  They have a lot of needs they do not understand so they need direction from adults in developing their own, personalized educational goals.  

So children need to learn skills to be a free, responsible, and peaceful member of society.  Our adult population reflects the educational system in which they grew up.  Our present educational system prohibits freedom and our society is a reflection of the lose of freedom.  We need to turn things around and re-create schools with a primary goal of education to be that all children learn how to be free in a responsible way.  So a goal for children is freedom or how to be free.  We need a lot of discussion about the meaning of freedom in our lives and the meaning of freedom in schools.  There is a compromise in which we can give children guidance and supervision but we can also give them experiences in making choices and in learning to be independent.  We not only need to give students some freedom to learn topics of their own choosing, but we need to provide them with experiences in which they learn to be self responsible and to cooperate with others.  Freedom is not just freedom to do what you want, but it means that you are capable to live in joy with others in a peaceful society and let others be free as well.  

Goals for humans and goals for education

I have been a teacher and instructional designer for nearly a half century.  I have seen so many innovations and changes throughout the decades, particularly in the last few decades with the integration of technology.  We are now experiencing a tremendous challenge with the Covid-19 and the need for online and blended learning.  Teachers are searching for ways to use technology that they have been discussing for years but might not have had the push to implement.  Now they are scrambling to put their curriculum online for students and to create a much different learning environment than we have ever known.

The big question is how do we make these changes and how many of these changes are needed for the long term and not just for this pandemic period.  We need to have a very serious conversation about how we can introduce blended learning into our educational system and how should we use technology to help us with our goals.  But I think that we now also need to take the time to start the conversation to replace our early 20th century educational goals with 21st century goals.  The old goals were framed around children as potential factory workers who needed to follow orders and to recite back information. During the last few decades, we have added more and more curriculum demands on the knowledge level for each grade.  We don't remove curriculum items as much as we just keep piling on more to require students to regurgitate. 

But the problem is that we have not taken a systematic approach to designing our own educational system.  We have taken the "just pile it on" approach and now we have a huge mess that we call a curriculum.  We need to take a step back and redesign the entire curriculum.  Sometimes, it is better to tear down and start over rather than keep on trying to patch things up.  In this case, we need to start all over with new goals that reflect mankind's 21st century goals.  Of course, we will need to agree upon what those new goals will be.

The Instructional Systems Design (ISD), or often just Instructional Design (ID), approach is an approach to design systems, which might mean organizations, businesses, schools, corporations, etc.  The educational system is a system.  The human system is also a system. Duh, you think, but we need to examine these two systems much more than we do.  ISD should be used to help us set new goals for our educational system.  We need to use a very methodical approach in designing our schools.  I have worked as an instructional designer for many years and I have used ISD to design and to develop hundreds of educational and training projects and instructional materials.  ISD provides a thorough analysis of a system and then recommends solutions to any system problems.  Problems within a system would be anything that might deter the system from meeting system goals. 

ISD will help a company identify areas in which the company needs to improve and determine if any of these areas for improvement are related to a need for education or training of some kind.  ISD process can also be used to help identify the goals for our educational system and then determine the instructional solution for obtaining those goals.  I maintain that the goals of the educational system must be in alignment with the goals of human beings.  It is our children who go through our created educational system and these children are humans.  I know that sounds dumb, but we often forget that we are creating a system that is not a corporation or business that needs training programs for specific needs for their employees.  We are talking about an education/training program for the needs of every child and therefore every human being in our nation.  There is not a specific need to fill any more.  We do not need to train children to work in factories or to get a job.  There are many, many training programs for specific work related skills and so getting training for a job is always possible for everyone and training will become even more easy for adults to get to prepare for good paying jobs that have immediate need in our society.

But we are now talking about creating the environment in which we will require all humans in our society to live. That is a much different set of goals to consider.  We must consider what are the goals of our children.  Are the goals of every child the same or different?  How much?  Children are like us.  Humans who are growing up into becoming adults who will become us.  What are the goals of children?  What are our goals as adults?  What are our goals as human beings?  How can we create an educational environment in which all children learn to obtain their individual goals?  The goals for this educational system should be the same goals for each individual human. 

We need to decide on the goals of the human system.  Determine the goals of humans first and then make them the goals of the educational system. 

What do you say are the goals of humans?

What is the Probe Method?

I created the Probe Method during the 1990s as a constructivist, problem-based learning (PBL) and cooperative learning model using technology.  The idea is that students are asked to take any topic, question, and/or problem and thoroughly investigate (probe) it.  Students work in small and/or larger groups and they sometimes work individually, but they use technology to help them investigate the topic, question, or problem, and they go deeper and deeper into their investigations, not just finding a few facts.  They make summaries of their findings and they share their information and ideas coming from the investigations.  They continue to work in small and larger groups to find out how and why and they look for deeper understanding and insight. 

For instance, students want to know why there is so much racism in America.  Racism is a topic.  Why does racism exist is a question.  How can we get rid of racism is a problem.  Students begin to work together to understand and help solve the problem of racism as a Probe Method project.  Students would normally be told to read an article or two on racism and maybe see a video on the topic and then they are asked to write a report on what they have learned and maybe their opinion in their paper.  But in the Probe Method students continue to do more and more readings and they ask more questions and do more reading and ask more questions.  You could expand the inquiry into many disciplines and into very heavy scientific and philosophical questions.

I'll write more about the Probe Method later.

Covid-19 is a challenge for our national consciousness

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a challenge to the development of our national consciousness or national mind.  The human consciousness follows stages in its development.  We have an individual consciousness that follows these same stages of growth and development.  I do not profess to fully understand all of human consciousness and the development of our entire universe or universes.  But I understand that we are all on the same path towards enlightenment, which might be defined as our ultimate goal for the growth and development of our consciousness.  We have our individual paths and we seek to be the best that we can be; we seek truth.  But our individual minds seek other people and they share their ideas and they form thoughts together.  They learn from one another and they begin to think quite a bit alike.  They take on similar characteristics and form their own group mind.  It's like a club that we join, but we pick people who are like minded and we want to get in good with the group so we want to be popular in the group.  The group becomes our identity and we don't want to upset others in our group.  We don't want to disagree with the group mind.

A group mind could be formed around a family, a religion, a culture, or any interest of likeness of mind.  It has led to political minds, conservative and liberal.  We are not all of like mind in this nation and we are made up of many small and larger group minds and we do not agree with each other.

So now Covid has pushed us into trying to come to some agreements and learn to develop a more united national mind.  The upcoming election in November is also challenging us to deal with our fragmented national mind or we could destroy our opportunity for growth of our consciousness.  How we deal with this situation will determine the direction of our human consciousness for many years to come.  The key to the development of the human consciousness is the ego.  The more self-centered we are, the more ego-centric we are.  Amoral means someone who has no consciousness about the life or feelings of anyone else.  This is the lowest level of ego development.  This state of mind would be people who are mass murderers or people who supported Nazis' torturing and murder of millions of people.  There are so many examples of people who seem to be able to hurt others without having any remorse and we cannot understand how anyone could do such horrendous things.  Then there are people who have some moral feelings for others but if they only feel for others who are like them.  They are racist or bigots and whatever you want to call them, but their egos are developing better than the amoral mind but they are still quite ego centric.  Then there are people who have expanded their consciousness to think beyond their own ego mind and they can feel what others feel and they want others to be happy and have a good life, just like them.  They even think beyond their smaller group minds and think about everyone in the society.

We presently have leadership that is very close to the amoral mind and I am very concerned that too many people in this country is being lured into this very dangerous mindset.  Our national mind cannot afford to go back to a white, male, supremacist mindset.  We must choose leadership that supports unity, freedom, and cooperation for all.  Our national human consciousness is at stake.  We need to put our fragmented and conflicting group minds together so we can grow and develop together in a positive way.

What will we do?  Be selfish.  Refuse to wear masks.  Fight each other.  Support leaders who lie to us on a regular basis.  Or are we going to put our minds together and solve our problems in a cooperative manner?

Let's have an educational revolution for a constructivist educational system

We need to have an educational revolution. Politicians and Mr. Money have controlled our educational system for over a century and it's time that we, the people, take over our own education.  We should decide what an education is and how we want to get our education and what our children's education should be.  The problem is that educators have been advocating for decades big changes to what and how we teach in the schools, but no one does anything about changing the system.  Politicians and big money control a required curriculum for every person in our nation and they control the type of instruction we receive in order to learn the curriculum.  The state is controlling what and how we learn and so they control us.  The state is taking away our freedom by controlling us as children and throughout our lives.  They make us go to a school and follow their orders, learn what they say to learn, do what they tell us to do, and make us do things when they say so.  Our children's time is controlled by the state along with their minds.  We were once children who were trapped in the educational system and we went along because we didn't know any other possibility.  We have been effectively brain-washed into thinking this brain-washing system we refer to as our schools is normal.

What I see as an educational revolution is all of us taking control of our own education and the education of our children.  I don't mean that we just physically seize the school buildings and take armed control of them.  I mean changing the curriculum and instruction so that each person creates his/her own education and decides on what to learn and how to learn it.  Each person should determine their own curriculum and instruction.  We need to stop letting politicians tell educators how to be educators.  That's like them telling medical doctors how to do their job and control the medical profession.  I have been in education for over 40 years and in higher education for over 20 years.  I know that most educators believe in a constructivist learning approach but they do not know how to implement such an approach when our entire system controls curriculum and instruction.

So we need a revolution.  We need to create a national constructivist educational system.  I won't go through a long and formal definition and explanation of constructivism, but I will say that in this approach children decide on what they will learn and they decide on how they like to learn.  Children create their own educational goals and objectives along with their parents and teachers.  The children, parents, and teachers also decide upon individualized instruction as well.  So the options for children are not limited by state controlled expectations and tests.  When the state controls testing of our children, then they control the curriculum and they control their minds.

We have a lot to do in this revolution and it has to start by our present teachers, administrators, professors of higher education, and all educational professionals must take the educational system away from politicians and business.  Our children deserve freedom.  Freedom to learn and freedom to think.  A constructivist educational system needs to replace the current education of controlled curriculum and instruction. 

Teachers and administrators in local schools should create their own constructivist school and implement without asking for permission.  We have the right to create our own education and we have a right to create our own public schools.  We don't need the state or federal OK.  A local school has the right to create a fully constructivist school without using any of the state's curriculum guidelines, instructional expectations, and testing.  Just refuse to give any mandated tests to your students.  A school should create a constructivist school so that every child and parent creates an individualized curriculum and instructional plan.  They can also plan how to evaluate and improve upon their own educational goals as time goes on.  This can be done and it's long past time for it to happen. 

So, teachers, go out their and talk your principal into creating a constructivist school!!!!