Jozi's Chapter 4 Reflection

Chapter 4 – Bog Reflection

Innovation is everything that education should be; creation is innovation, expertise is knowledge, critical thinking skills is creative thinking using connections, empathy, sympathy, and experimentation to generate a broader deeper understanding. What brings us joy in our lives is the very essence of what teaching and learning should be, but often isn’t. Teachers struggle with letting go, time, resources, and the growing apathy of our students towards learning and their world in general. Kids express lack of desire, motivation, and care. They are bored, frustrated, stressed out and often angry with instruction and teachers- with education in general. This forced me to think about motivation, what it, where does it grow from, is and what it looks like.

I really don’t know if I can examine others’ motivation, as well as I can my own. So why do I work so hard at this frustrating, harshly looked upon, often thankless, always chaotic career? The answer is because I was a student and not a very good one. In fact, the beginning part of my adult life was grounded in my experiences in school. I found that I was less, unequal, slow, and generally dissatisfactory in school, I simply was not a success. Therefore, in the earliest days of my adult life I acted as if I was all of those things- and life was not good. Then I had a child and I was really good at being a mother, because that was an education that I could not and would not fail in and from that learning experience I grew. By the end of College, I was aware that I was none of the things that I identified about myself in my earlier educational journey. Today, I see myself in a completely different light defined by my later educational experience. So I teach. I teach like a crazy woman giving time and resources I often don’t have just to ensure that there will be one less poorly defined adult in the world.

So the question is where do the kids find their motivation that changes into a passion? And is every single person innovator material? What if they are not innovators? Are their levels or degrees of being an innovator? This label is worrisome for me only because it comes with an expectation of something great.

I think that the important take away from Chapter 4 is not an understanding that the creation of innovators is success, but an understanding that helping kids find a passion or “intrinsic motivation” for learning through the implementation of student centered, PBL activities because having a passion for learning learning creates lifelong learners and I am certain that the largest byproduct will be innovation by innovators.