COLLABORATIVE
MINDS = INFINITE
POSSIBILITIES
I
am writing this article as I listen
to the early morning 5:30 a.m.
prayers echoing through Lahore,
Pakistan. This is a place where
relationships are the lifeblood
of society. People spend their lives
building, retaining, and growing strong
relationships, which in turn builds trust
between people.
BY KIM LANGEN
It is also the foundation to complex
problem solving at all social levels. Just
watching how people interact and work
together here is an art in and of itself.
The skills required to build the intricate
web of relationships are as complex as
any human endeavour, yet so much of
the global educational focus stressed in
schools and demanded by parents is on
individual achievement, with minimal
to no assessment based on the ability to
problem solve with others.
"
INDIVIDUALIZED
LEARNING IS VERY
MUCH LIKE WATCHING
A BLACK-AND-WHITE
TELEVISION SHOW: NOT
ONLY IS THE EXPERIENCE
LIMITED, BUT SO IS THE
INFORMATION THAT
COMES YOUR WAY.
12
"
The understanding of successfully
educating a person starts with the
most basic black-and-white idea of
teaching students how to do a test. In
other words, if you teach your students
how to do the questions on a pre-
described test, then you are successful.
Students are inherently taught that
they will be told what to expect, then
to individually work towards that pre-
described black-and-white assessment.
Unfortunately, for many people, this is
all that a person experiences in their
educational life. There are two issues
with this: the first is that a person can
succeed in this paradigm by simply
investing a lot of time in themselves to
increase their personal knowledge and
skills, creating a population of siloed
people who do not have the experience