The Ultimate Contextualizing Prompt

MORE, BETTER, DIFFERENT?

Humans effect CHANGE (improvement, reform, transformation, cure, etc.) in 3 ways:

1) They do what they've been doing, but do MORE of it. 
For instance, kids will learn to read better if we give them more of the same instruction we've been giving them!

OR  

2) They do what they've been doing, but do it BETTER.
For instance, kids will learn to read better if we give them more of the same instruction but are mindful of everything we do in instructing them, so that they get a higher quality of teaching.
OR

3) They do something DIFFERENT! (example: ???)

PS - People can and often do deceive themselves into believing that MORE or BETTER is actually DIFFERENT!

Truly 'doing' DIFFERENT likely involves CREATIVITY!

Mom took me by the hand to half day Kindergarten at PS 187Q in 1953. School reform was underway back then and has been since. Are we in an endless quest to reform schools? Will they ever be reformed enough so that we might simply have to improve them? Why does reform stay on the radar screen so prominently?

MG


(artifacts of interest):

"A Nation at Risk" judged U.S. schools to be mediocre enough to endanger the economic future of the country, school reform has become a major industry.

Below, from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nation_at_Risk

A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform is the 1983 report of American President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education. Its publication is considered a landmark event in modern American educational history. Among other things, the report contributed to the ever-growing assertion that American schools were failing,^[1][2] and it touched off a wave of local, state, and federal reform efforts.

What Was Education Like Before Sputnik? http://www.nas.edu/sputnik/bybee2.htm
(Sputnik 1 - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_1

Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957, orbiting for three weeks before its ..)

Education reform : Education reform is the name given to the goal of changing public education. Historically, reforms have taken different forms because the motivations of reformers have differed. However, since the 1980s, education reform has been focused on changing the existing system from one focused on inputs to one focused on outputs (i.e., student achievement). 

*** ( from Wikipedia) Bloom's taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. The three lists cover the learning objectives in cognitive, affective and sensory domains.

Although named after Bloom, the publication of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives followed a series of conferences from 1949 to 1953, which were designed to improve communication between educators on the design of curricula and examinations.^[3]

While virtually every teacher is made familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy in pre and in-service credit bearing Education courses AND in professional development, career-long, most educators are aware of and use only Bloom's taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. The Afective Domain? Apparently we are doing some catch up now... think: Universal Design for Learning and Social and Emotional Learning.

M. Gura

^{Top of Mind. Representation of Bloom’s New Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain from the book Make, Learn, Succeed: Creating a Culture of Creativity in Your Classroom (ISTE 2018).}