Ariel Diaz talking at TEDxCambridge 2013 tells the story of how, as a 10 year old boy, he became fascinated by Formula One racing cars and it inspired him to study engineering. As an undergraduate studying Engineering at Dartmouth College he found himself leading a team to build a race car and immersed in equations that enabled him to understand the dynamics of the vehicle. He spent night after night getting deep into these formulas but it was exciting and the purpose of this deep involvement was realised in the making and the creation of the race car. He argues that he would never have wanted to learn and master the equations if he had been made to memorise them without appreciating their purpose and significance and then goes on to draw the analogy with education.
In his view 'we are forcing students to memorize seemingly irrelevant and mundane and boring details before allowing them to see the beauty and excitement intrinsic in every subject that they're about to study'. He maintains that 'education is created by experts and because they have so much knowledge about their subject they try to teach the detail before they share their understanding of the the beauty of the subject that got them excited in that subject in the first place'. His solution is to invert the curriculum - begin with the big inspiring ideas that give the context and purpose for studying something... then take students along a pathway which allows them to discover things for themselves before immersing them in the detail that reveals the inner workings of the subject. The wisdom in this story is that this is the way we learn in life outside the abstracted world of formal education. We find things we are interested in or need to know about and then work out how to gain a deeper understanding. Our interests, passions and needs provide us with the purpose that makes us want to learn more. We begin with the problem, the opportunity or the vision, we work out some ways of finding out more before we get into the detail of problem working or solution finding.
Diaz's solution to making formal education more relevant, exciting and meaningful is to flip the entire curriculum 'we need to start with the big ideas because when you start with big ideas you give students a great context and relevance for the subject they're about to study and also create inspiration and motivation. Then when you have this context and motivation you're able to create a natural and not forced learning pathway because that excitement that motivation leads to questions - how and why and then by answering those questions you get to organically build a deep [and personally significant] knowledge and a deep expertise.'
I picked this up through a twitter link.
Diaz's solution to making formal education more relevant, exciting and meaningful is to flip the entire curriculum 'we need to start with the big ideas because when you start with big ideas you give students a great context and relevance for the subject they're about to study and also create inspiration and motivation. Then when you have this context and motivation you're able to create a natural and not forced learning pathway because that excitement that motivation leads to questions - how and why and then by answering those questions you get to organically build a deep [and personally significant] knowledge and a deep expertise.'
I picked this up through a twitter link.
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