Teaching Students Skills, Rather Than Merely Facts

On Saturday, October 12, 2013, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, and his wife MacKensie Bezos, helped to launch the Center for Innovation at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. The Museum’s website introduces the Center in this way:

What does innovation look like? Who innovates, where does it happen, and how do great ideas evolve? To find out more, tackle a challenge in the Idea Lab, discover a Seattle-made invention in the Patent Tree, and check out cutting-edge concepts in What’s Next. Through lectures, special programs and changing displays, Seattle innovators will share their latest projects and invite you to take a look at the future as it unfolds. – See more.

As an educational psychologist, I cannot help but admire this effort that models the very best practices in teaching and learning. For years now, academic research has been urging the education system to incorporate strategies that we know to improve student learning. For too long, education has relied on a “top-down” approach, where experts fill the empty minds of students through lecture and then ask those students to regurgitate those facts back on exams.

What educational researchers have found is that this model is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways. First, students do not enter the school situation with a blank slate. Rather, by the time teachers see their students, they have already developed conceptions of the world, pragmatic schemas for interacting with new information. A teacher’s job is not to spew facts, but to challenge students to question their constructed ideas, and to create progressively more complicated strategies for taking new information and integrating it with their prior knowledge.

Second, the secret to giving students the tools they need to succeed and remember the information we want them to have over the long term is to focus our energies not just on facts, but on skills. What our students need in the real world is not to become repositories of information, or to be good test takers. Students need great teachers to strengthen them into thinkers who can brainstorm, solve problems, and collaborate with others. Those are the skills that matter in real life. The Bezos Center for Innovation is providing a platform for visitors to interact with exhibits in ways that could inspire the highest forms of cognitive processing; namely, creativity and synthesis.

The days of stale lectures and memorization, when they finally disappear from the training programs our educators must complete to become teachers, will usher in a welcome phase of instruction that centers on helping our students be nimble of mind and able to move our species forward with zest. The Bezos Center is a big step in that direction.

—

Originally published on Dr. John Rich

—

◊♦◊The Good Men Project is different from most media companies. We are a “participatory media company”—which means we don’t just have content you read and share and comment on but it means we have multiple ways you can actively be a part of the conversation. As you become a deeper part of the conversation—The Conversation No One Else is Having—you will learn all of the ways we support our Writers’ Community—community FB groups, weekly conference calls, classes in writing, editing platform building and How to Create Social Change.

◊♦◊

Here are more ways to become a part of The Good Men Project community:

Request to join our private Facebook Group for Writers—it’s like our virtual newsroom where you connect with editors and other writers about issues and ideas.

Click here to become a Premium Member of The Good Men Project Community. Have access to these benefits:

1. Get  access to an exclusive “Members Only” Group on Facebook
2. Join our Social Interest Groups—weekly calls about topics of interest in today’s world
3. View the website with no ads
4. Get free access to classes, workshops, and exclusive events
5. Be invited to an exclusive weekly “Call with the Publisher” with other Premium Members
6. Commenting badge.

Are you stuck on what to write? Sign up for our Writing Prompts emails, you’ll get ideas directly from our editors every Monday and Thursday. If you already have a final draft, then click below to send your post through our submission system.

If you are already working with an editor at GMP, please be sure to name that person. If you are not currently working with a GMP editor, one will be assigned to you.

◊♦◊

Are you a first-time contributor to The Good Men Project? Submit here:

◊♦◊

Have you contributed before and have a Submittable account? Use our Quick Submit link here:

◊♦◊

Do you have previously published work that you would like to syndicate on The Good Men Project? Click here:

Join our exclusive weekly “Call with the Publisher” — where community members are encouraged to discuss the issues of the week, get story ideas, meet other members and get known for their ideas? To get the call-in information, either join as a member or wait until you get a post published with us. Here are some examples of what we talk about on the calls.

Want to learn practical skills about how to be a better Writer, Editor or Platform Builder? Want to be a Rising Star in Media? Want to learn how to Create Social Change? We have classes in all of those areas.

While you’re at it, get connected with our social media:

◊♦◊

However, you engage with The Good Men Project—you can help lead this conversation about the changing roles of men in the 21st century. Join us!

◊♦◊

We have pioneered the largest worldwide conversation about what it means to be a good man in the 21st century. Your support of our work is inspiring and invaluable.
—

Photo credit: Shutterstock ID 527170744