Group 3 consisting of Bryan Marcus and Lauren

Education and the need for innovation.

I once had a teacher who failed epically at her job. She taught sophomore science in Palmer High School. I don’t remember her ever standing and teaching, saying anything to inspire us, or even explaining assignments. I just remember getting progress reports that said I was failing. In fact ¾ of her class not only was failing, but did in fact fail, like me. That is why I say she failed epically, when ¾ of your students fail to learn the topic, something is broken. While several of the kids were more interested in the science of agricultural cultivation of Cannabis sativa (marijuana), it’s a problem shared by most of the teachers at most of the high schools I have ever heard of, yet they have better than a 25% pass rate. So, why is she still teaching? Because there are things in the education system that are broken. For example:

Teachers who don’t care (like the one mentioned above) are teaching. They don’t really care so they assign pointless assignments (who ever learned anything from doing a word find anyway) and students are picking up the attitude and not caring about doing the pointless assignments. It’s broken. If a teachers job and/or pay depended on student evaluation of teachers, combined with student performance then there would be great improvement in teacher quality. The teachers who didn’t perform well would find other jobs and be replaced by teachers who could and would do well.

Homework is often not very effective in helping students learn. It’s broken. The majority of students learn better from doing creative assignments, like the ones we do in this class. The candy trading exercise, for example, was very good at demonstrating the point that getting products to the people who want them adds value to them, and it was fun to boot. –points please.) That was much more effective than a worksheet of processing times tables.

Lack of reward or drive for innovation makes for a stagnant system. We talk about how our school system is falling behind those of other countries yet, to my knowledge, we have no system in place to provoke innovation, creation or implementation of new and better ways of teaching kids. As far as I know it’s all from top down. Also broken. Hears a radical idea, if the education system was broken into smaller education corporations that were competing with each other innovation and creation would be much more highly valued. It took about 5 years to go from the Nokia brick to the I-phone, what contribution could a creative mind like that of Steve Jobs’ make to education?

If we can have ordinary things that still function well, like a grocery cart, undergo this amazing design process to create a better, more human centered product then, I have full faith that the education system could be vastly improved by the same process. These are a few of our ideas, what thoughts do you have for how the design process could be implemented to make the education system better?