New World – Old Classrooms

• Cathy believes that the current stress on national standards and standardized tests seem to be preparing students for the past rather than a world of social networking, crowd-sourcing, customizing, and user-generated content. The interactive task of surfing is not better or worse than the reception model that dominated the twentieth century, but it is different as we concentrate a different way when we are clicking to make connections. Cathy maintains that kids aren’t failing because school is too hard, but because it doesn’t interest them as we prepare them for jobs that no longer exist.
• Research shows that kids improve with directed, special attention to their own skills and interests, the opposite of our move toward standardization. To prepare kids for jobs in the digital economy, one needs an emphasis on creative thinking at all levels. If you measure narrowly, you see results narrowly. The more standardized the assessment, the more kids fail. Cathy also sites the fact that kids write better when they blog than when they do traditional term papers.

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