TOMMIE SAYLOR: Learning what a student can do is more important than learning what they know

“You can’t change the fruit without changing the root.”  

Stephen R. Covey

By Tommie Saylor

Kennedy High School Principal

The world has changed, and we in the field of education must change with it.

Since the conception of public education, students have been forced to memorize a collection of facts, figures, and general good-to-know information.  At the time, pre-industrial revolution, this made sense. Books were rare and very expensive, libraries were few and only existed in major cities, and for the most part, information was hard to find and/or gather.  

So, the solution was to just simply have students memorize facts and information to include capitals, countries, history, world leaders, science, poems and other literature, important documents like the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, and so forth.  One’s level of intelligence was even measured by how much information a person could or had memorized.  

The more information you could blindly spew out, the “smarter” you were, as it was once thought.  To measure one’s level of learnedness, standardized tests were developed where a battery of questions would be asked and the more a student could answer in a specific time frame gave educators a standard in which students could be measured against.

Rote memorization was king, repetitively reading, speaking and writing the same thing over and over again was the one and only education methodology.

At the time when this method was developed it made sense. Accurate and up-to-date information was difficult to find.  

We now live in a day where most people carry with them a smart phone and/or tablet that can access the Internet. The Internet essentially holds the accumulation of all human knowledge. Memorizing information that can be found in seconds on our devices seems rather pointless.  

Hand a kid a smart phone and ask them any question. Within seconds they will give you the answer.

Furthermore, in the business world employers are looking for employees that can work cooperatively and can find information that is more likely to be up-to-date as opposed to knowing old information. They are seeking employees that are creative and can think “out of the box.”  The old idea that you “sit in perfect rows, be quiet and don’t talk to your neighbor, keep your eyes on your own paper, figure out the problem by yourself”-type of teaching method is no longer effective in today’s world.  

Today employers don’t want this kind of employee, and students no longer understand nor respond to this archaic pedagogy.

Today’s classroom needs to focus more on how to use information and less on the acquisition of information. Teach students how to work together in teams and groups. Teach students how to find, break down, filter through and utilize the easily accessible mounds of information.

Ten years ago when smart phones first “hit the scene,” schools were quick to tell students to leave them at home. We didn’t want them to be used when taking a test.

Today, the field of education is turning toward allowing students to use smart phones, tablets and laptops in class. After all what is wrong with students looking up information, facts and figures in a classroom?  

A paradigm shift is occurring where cooperative problem solving, teamwork and information synthesis is now king.  Even our standardized tests are changing from regurgitation of information to problem solving and analysis.  

What a student can do is becoming much more important than what they know.

Remember, their future is in our hands. Making Kennedy the school of choice. Excellence by design.