Saturday, April 27, 2013

Cage-Busting Skunks Disrupting the Status Quo - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher

Cage-Busting Skunks Disrupting the Status Quo - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher:


Cage-Busting Skunks Disrupting the Status Quo


"When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal."

~Garrison Keillor~

This is a blog about innovation--that is, innovation in public education. More specifically, creating catchy memes to push "pioneering" thinking while simultaneously attacking the "status quo" (painted as bad, very bad) in American education. Under the benign banner of...innovation.
A decade ago, we were new-millennials, thinking out of the box. Then it was all about Shift Happens, which morphed into mega-excitement around disrupting class--flipping classrooms, embracing blended learning, anointing "Video Sal" Khan as America's best (read: cheapest) teacher. Now, all the flippers, shifters and disrupters have moved to the next big thing: cage-busting.
In Michigan, they're doing this by creating a secret task force--no educators allowed!--to design ground-breaking