From Knowing Right Answers to Knowing How to Behave When Answers Are Not Readily Apparent Schools
Tend to teach, assess, and reward convergent thinking and the acquisition of content and with a limited range of acceptable answers. Life in the real-world, however, demands multiple ways to do something well. A fundamental shift is required from valuing right answers as the purpose for learning, to knowing how to behave when we don't know answers—knowing what to do when confronted with those paradoxical, dichotomous, enigmatic, confusing, ambiguous, discrepant, and sometimes overwhelming situations that plague our lives. all requires a shift from valuing knowledge acquisition outcome to valuing knowledge production as an outcome. We want students to learn how to develop a critical stance with their work: inquiring, thinking flexibly, and learning from another person's perspective. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not if all people were only having information but knowing how to alike we could have act on it. "one size fits all".
By definition, a problem is any stimulus, schools, a common question, task, phenomenon, or discrepancy, curriculum, and even the explanation for which is not immediately standardized tests known. Thus, we are interested in focusing on tudent performance under those challenging conditions that demand strategic reasoning, insightfulness, perseverance, creativity, and precision to resolve a complex problem.
As our paradigm shifts, we will need to let go of our obsession with acquiring content knowledge as an end in itself, and make room for viewing content as a vehicle for developing broader, more persuasive and complex goals such as personal efficacy, flexibility, craftsmanship, consciousness, and interdependence (Costa and Garmston 1994).
We must finally admit that process is the content. The core of our curriculum must focus on such processes as learning to learn, knowledge production, metacognition, transference of, decision making, creativity, and group problem solving. These are the subject matters of instruction. Content, selectively abandoned and judiciously selected because of its fecund contributions to the thinking/ learning process, becomes the vehicle to carry the processes of learning. The focus is on learning from the objectives instead of learning of the objectives (Costa and Liebmann 1997).
From Uniformity to DiversityIt is acceptance and trust that make it possible for each bird to sing its own song— confident that it will be heard—even by those who sing with a different voice (Hateley and Schnidt 1995).
Life might seem easier if all members of the learning community thought and acted in a similar fashion. If all people were alike we could have "one size fits all" schools, a common curriculum, and even standardized tests. Human beings, however, are made to be different. Diversity is the basis of biological survival. Each of us has a different genetic structure, unique facial features, a distinguishing, a distinctive signature, diverse backgrounds of knowledge, experience, and culture, and a preferred way of gathering, processing, and expressing information and knowledge. We even have a singular frequency in which we vibrate (Leonard 1978). We need to capitalize on these differences to enhance intellectual growth.
Interdependent learning communities are built not by obscuring diversity but by valuing the friction those differences bring and resolving those differences in an atmosphere of trust and reciprocity. Appreciation for diversity can be encouraged by deliberately bringing together people of different political and religious persuasions, cultures, gender, cognitive styles, belief systems, modality preferences and intelligences. In an atmosphere of trust, structuring such diversity within decision-making groups not only enhances the decisions that are made but also stretches members' capacity for flexibility and empathy. Our old perceptions of uniformity need to yield in deference to valuing diversity—the true source of power in today's world.
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