Play & Thinking : the future of education?

By Kelly Gibbs

25 January 2018

Image source: CNN article

While digital skills are a factor in the curriculum at Quest, it seems that mental innovation is the way of the future.

Getting the students & teachers to think in new ways sets Quest apart from the current public school method. A big reason why critical thinking isn’t taught in most public schools is because of the time it takes to teach and assess skills like this within the current system. The way schools run now, teachers are supposed to teach students a curriculum and intermittently give mass standardized testing in order to evaluate the huge number of students moving their way through public schools. The problem is that assessing long-form responses that would be needed for critical thinking questions are not possible under current public school constraints.

Perhaps in order to make vast changes in public school settings, it’s necessary to allow for large-scale outside intervention in the form of external actors.

Some organizations are now specializing in teaching mental methods for both students and teachers, as often times teachers need to be re-trained to both think and teach critically. One example is Thinking Schools South Africa, which states that their mission is to “empower schools to grow a culture of explicit thinking so that students become independent lifelong learners”.

While being adept at learning digital skills is an important characteristic of today’s students, it is truly the way of thinking which sets countries apart as far as innovation, including in the digital sector. From a Financial Times article, “As the rise of tech companies shows, there are high salaries for those most able to organise the world’s messy information. The challenge for schools is to combine the teaching of knowledge with the ability to marshal those facts in unfamiliar situations.” This article looks at the OECD report from 2014 which shows that schools in East Asian territories (Singapore’s Lifelong Learning Institute is an example) are much better at teaching creative thinking and thus produce more capable students. These students are excelling in all areas but especially the S.T.E.M fields.

If we can take these examples and pillars and encourage more public schools and the teachers within them to incorporate them into the curriculum, sweeping global changes in education could be made. Producing critically-thinking citizens should be the goal of schools and the ongoing digital revolution.