Kim Ibara's List: Educational Paradigm

• Thoughtfulness only enters in when I wonder about the meaning of the work.
• Can you dig below the surface, the ‘cover’ of ‘coverage’ to ponder what underlies it? Typically, however, both teachers and students need merely follow through, in a disciplined way, to complete all their assigned tasks.
• More content and more mental work can never make people more thoughtful, if the lessons bypass thought in favor of mere content mastery. Indeed, lots of knowledge without thoughtfulness makes matters worse.
• Indeed, the claim that “I have to cover all the content” is thoughtless in another way. Look at the language: it is egocentric, cast only in terms of what you will do. But teaching is not about what you will do; I am interested in what the student will be able to do of value as a result of your teaching, because that is all that matters.
• The thought-provoking issue here is that most educators agree with these thinkers – but then fail to see that when their work deviates from what they assented to. The truth about thoughtful teaching is accepted, then continually ignored. Critical thinking is praised as a goal, but the work assigned often doesn’t demand it.
• I have never met a teacher who wanted to stifle thoughtfulness. But I have met thousands of teachers who do not realize that their methods of teaching and measuring learning may unwittingly stifle thoughtfulness. Your students can only be thoughtful if you model thoughtful questioning of the content and if the curriculum makes them thoughtfully probe the content and its meaning, not just learn it.

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