Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Leadership

A Deliberate Waste of Talent?

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Current approaches to education and training are hobbled by assumptions about intelligence and creativity that have squandered the talents and stifled the creative confidence of untold numbers of people. This waste stems partly from an obsession with certain types of acadmic ability and from a preoccupation with standardized testing. The waste of talent is not deliberate…

The waste of talent may not be deliberate but it is systemic. It is systemic, because public education is a system, and it is based on deep-seated assumptions that are no longer true.

– Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative

Changing Education Paradigms – RSA

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Watch this talk by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award, about changing education paradigms. He raises a lot of insightful points regarding the apparent and non-apparent outcomes of the enlightenment educational paradigm that has dominated our learning landscape.

He argues that “great learning happens in groups” and that “collaboration is the stuff of growth.” He also brings forward the argument that the habits of our institutions need to be altered, if significant change in education and, in turn, our society is to happen.

What would it look like if we thought differently about human capacity?

Watch this short film to learn and be amazed.

Book Review: The Mentor’s Guide – Zachary

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Book jacketLois Zachary does not only set out the basic principles and best practices of mentoring in The Mentor’s Guide, she actually goes a step further and helps readers discover their own personal mentoring style and preferences.

Through many exercises, she guides the reader through introspection and action. Thus, she not only conceptually ties mentoring to adult education, but she actually writes in a manner according to the principles of adult education.

Consequently, she challenges the prevailing myths of mentoring, and proposes a model of mentoring where both mentor and mentee are fully engaged and learning from one another. Her proposed model is one that is based on critical reflection and application, rather than knowledge transfer and acquisition (Location 300).

[Read more…] about Book Review: The Mentor’s Guide – Zachary

Book Review: On Teaching and Learning – Vella

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Book jacketJane Vella’s On Teaching and Learning is a magnificent follow-up book to the principles of dialogue education she laid out in Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach (2002).

In this book, Vella takes the principles of dialogue education and shows what it looks like to put them into action through both the traditional face-to-face educational setting and also in an online setting.

Dialogue education is not merely a pedagogy; it is more importantly a way to make society a place of peace (xix). Thus, teaching with dialogue education involves listening to learners, empowering them, and respecting them (xix). Consequently, the following statement appropriately sums up the necessary subconscious of dialogue educators – “the dialogue is not a dialogue between teachers and learner, but among learners, of whom the teacher is one” (xxi). [Read more…] about Book Review: On Teaching and Learning – Vella