Make It Personal

We've all heard the phrase, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink," right? I've heard the same things said about students. We used to believe that if we, as educators, provided the opportunity to learn, it was up to kids to take advantage of that opportunity. To a degree, it's a true sentiment. We can't force a student to learn. But what if we amended the original statement: You can lead a horse to water. You can't make it drink, but you CAN make it thirsty! If we can tap into a student's interests and passions, then we can provide a reason for them to want to learn. If we can help students to discover a purpose for learning, we can make them thirsty. We can help them build their innate drive to learn that will serve them for the rest of their lives.  Canyon Lake students at our career fair Too often, a student's demonstrated work fails to reflect what they can do; instead, it shows us what they're ...

Our current educational system was designed during the industrial revolution, using an industrial model. We would batch kids by age and send them along the grade-level assembly line, assuming they needed the same things at the same time in order to come out of the system "complete." The culmination of the system resulted in students being sorted into blue-collar professions and white-collar professions. For a long time, the system worked. But over the course of the last 50 years, the wage disparity between those who earned a college degree and those who hadn't has widened significantly. As a result, more and more families struggle to have their basic needs met. Our educational system hasn't adapted to meet the needs of 21st Century society. Industrial era manufacturing and industrial era education share many similarities In July 2016, my school was awarded a large grant from our state Department of Education to try to do something different, something innova...