Our children are constantly expected to conform to expectations, rules, decisions made by others for them and we seem to of forgotten what it is to be a child.
In my humble opinion I believe we should be encouraging children to hold on to their imagination, to play, to relax and to explore our amazing world and everything it has to offer. We need to encourage our children to think and develop ideas and solutions. Gone are the days when neat books and having the answers to pop quizzes was enough. Gone are the days when knowing things mattered - now we have to ensure our children know how to find the answers.
I have watched teaching morph over the past 12 years and I must say I don't necessarily believe it has changed for the best. Yes we have higher expectations of our children and we are working harder now to help them achieve but at what cost.
I see fewer and fewer teachers taking the teachable moments, going outside to look at the digger that has pulled up next door, gazing at clouds for 10 minutes then writing about them, reading about spiders then going outside to find some in their habitat... More and more time is spent putting pressure on children to acheive, to reach expectations and never straying from the planning because you won't hit the expectation if you change anything.
Thank goodness at Alfredton we have teachers who are willing to take those moments and use them to help our children learn and achieve!
I recently watched Sir Ken Robinson's presentation about School's Killing Creativity (I must of watched this at least 100 times now!) and once again I was struck with the profound impact these ideas have on education. Sir Ken was also involved in the following video clip that I think every adult who has a child in education should watch and then go to their schools and ask what we are doing to prepare our children for this future...
Now ask yourself what you are doing.....
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