Wise up!

Wiser educators, more capable students

I attended a webinar (Equipping students for the 21st century: The Big Five Challenges in Education in a Changed World – ACER) that was looking at how 21st century skills could be taught, learnt and assessed.  The three skills that were used for illustration were creative thinking, creativity, and collaboration.

In cognitive science there is a proposal that simply being intelligent (which is a largely fixed quantity for any given individual) is not enough as even with high intelligence we can do foolish things or be otherwise deluded.  What cognitive science proposes is that being wise is the state where we can see through delusion and foolishness and act more closely in line with reality.

Further, the proposal is that through the development of ‘rationality’ – which is not fixed but can develop over time – we can use our intelligence more wisely and ‘rationality’ involves the development of inference (critical thinking), insight (creativity) and caring (foundation of collaboration).

A neat parallel between what we want to teach and a pathway to wiser adulthood.

Pierre-August Renoir - The skiff (La yole)

The obvious conclusion from this is that if we want to teach these skills to students the adults themselves should be building their capacity for ‘rationality’ and becoming wiser, too.

In the webinar there was no mention of the role of the teacher other than in providing the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Surely the adult must model these behaviours.

It is hard to claim that we would not be better off with wiser educators.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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