Provocations
Questions to get you thinking and schools and schooling - fill yer boots!
- Can the best school have the worst results?
- Do you have to have been a teacher to be a school leader?
- Do you have to have been a good teacher to be a good school leader?
- Are good teachers born not made?
- It is OK to help a student get an A in a subject even though, in doing so, you kill off that student's love of that subject?
- Is teaching from a script acceptable?
- Should teaching from a script be compulsory if it gets better exam results?
- What are they learning while you're teaching them?
- What is the purpose of education?
- What is the purpose of school?
- If the two answers are different, how do you reconcile that?
- Is there a place for learning technologies in school?
- If you have to choose between rejecting learning technologies because they don't fit the school model or changing the school model, which would you choose?
- Should schools be measured on the quality of the adult, years after they have left school?
- If a student gets a string of top grades but then goes onto have mental health issues at university, has that student been let down by his or her school?
- Do you agree that primary teachers teach children and secondary teachers teach subjects?
- Do your A grade students get their grades because of you or despite you?
- If all my D-grade students get Cs and so do my B-grade students, am I due a performance-related raise?
- Is 'Don't smile till Christmas' sound advice to give a new teacher?
- Can you be an effective teacher if you don't really like children?
- Should schools have a zero-tolerance behaviour policy towards all children?
- Should behaviour policies be differentiated for young people in the way that learning can be?
- Is it the school's job to get young people to think? Or to not think?
- Is it anyone's interests having young people thinking for themselves?
- Could it be argued that the child who does what they are told with the least resistance is the most useful to that school and the least useful to the planet?
- Do you think that teaching is more of a science than an art?
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Is failing school the best thing some children can do?
- Should the Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic be replaced, as Sugata Mitra thinks might be useful, with the three Cs of comprehension, communication and calculation?
- Does a chid fail school or does the school fail the child?
- Is a national curriculum better than a local curriculum?
- Should there a global curriculum?
- Is the same amount learned as is taught? If not, can you explain the difference?
- Is 'efficiency' the worst possible goal for education?
- Why do they need a teacher when they've got Google?
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About the author
Ian Gilbert
Ian is an award-winning writer, editor, speaker, innovator and the founder of Independent Thinking. He has lived and worked in Europe, the Middle East, South America and Asia and is privileged to have such a global view of education and education systems.