PR for People Monthly November 2013 The Entrepreneurial Mindset | Page 6
On Saturday, October 12, 2013, Jeff Bezos,
founder of Amazon.com, and his wife Mackenzie
Bezos, helped to launch the Center for Innovation at the
Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. The Museum’s website introduces the center in this way:
What does innovation look like? Who innovates,
where does it happen, and how do great ideas evolve?
To find out more, tackle a challenge in the Idea Lab,
discover a Seattle-made invention in the Patent Tree,
and check out cutting-edge concepts in What’s Next.
Through lectures, special programs and changing displays, Seattle innovators will share their latest projects
and invite you to take a look at the future as it unfolds.
- See more at:
http://www.mohai.org/exhibits/center-forinnovation#sthash.Nya7R3g3.dpuf
As an educational psychologist, I cannot help
but admire this application ofBest Practices in teaching and learning. For years now, academic research has
been urging the education system to incorporate strategies that we know improve student learning. For too
long, education has relied on a “top-down” approach,
where experts fill their lectures with facts, then ask the
students to regurgitate those facts back on exams.
This model is fundamentally flawed in a number
of ways. First, students do not enter the school situation
with a blank slate. Rather, by the time teachers seethem,
their students have already developed conceptions of
the world, pragmatic schemas for interacting with new
information. A teacher’s job is not to spew facts, but to
challenge students to question their constructed ideas,
to create progressively more complicated strategies for
taking new information, and integrating it with their
prior knowledge.
Second, the secret to giving students the tools they
need to succeed and remember the information we want
them to have, over the long term, is to focus our energies not just on facts, but on skills. What our students
need in the real world is not to become repositories of
information, or to be good test takers. Students need
great teachers to strengthen theirthinking skills, people
prepared to brainstorm, solve problems, and collaborate
with others. Those are the skills that matterin real life.
Those are the practices that make for successful entrepreneurs.The Bezos Center for Innovation is providing a platform for visitors to interact with exhibits in
ways that could inspire the highest forms of cognitive
processing,namely creativity and synthesis.
The days of stale lectures and memorization,
when they finally disappear from training to become
teachers, will usher in a welcome phase of instruction
that centers on helping our students be nimble of mind,
and able to move our species forward with zest. The
Bezos Center is a big step in that direction.
John D Rich, Jr., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Delaware State University, email: [email protected],
Press Kit: http://www.prforpeople.com/johndrich/