Yong Zhao's visit - reinvigorated inspiration!

Yong Zhao visited the BSW Region in Geelong on June 1st. I attended a 2 hour workshop as well as listening to more of his insightful thinking points at our Leadership Dinner that evening. Yong concentrated a lot of his discussion on the changing nature of the demands of education, citing the work of Herbert Spencer as well as delving into Daniel Pink's ideology of 'A Whole New Mind'. His discussion with us on these points encouraged the educators present to consider the trend towards a demand in the workforce for more jobs that demand:
DESIGN - create new ways of doing/seeing things
NARRATIVE - storytellers, ability to communicate and share
EMPATHY - understand how to work with others and ability to decipher why people think the way that they do
SYNTHESIS - put things together, make connections
'PLAY' - ability to entertain and meet the needs of specific audiences (driven by narrowcasting)

Yong made a few metaphors for us that rang true for me:

Medicine - what are the side effects of aiming only for good test scores???

A gardener - is it our job to decide what are the weeds? In doing so, are we 'pruning' a diverse human being into an 'empoyable person', for jobs that do not exist yet that we are uncertain what the skill set is?

I also found that another discussion point of Yong's lingered in my mind for many days afterwards and has driven much of my thinking and reflection.......

Are we focusing on fixing the deficits in our students instead of promoting their strengths?  I found this profound considering the work that I am currently engaged in about effective goal setting for students. By always working on 'fixing' what students cannot do, do we deny them of the time to build upon their talents too much?

I passionately agree with Yong that we need to inspire our students to be 'great', not just be mediocre and fill assembly line jobs that will, most likely if history continues as it has, be non-existent in years to come. We need our young people to be entrepreneurs and equip them with the skills and desire to be anything that they want to be.

I'm interested in your thoughts and any insight into the work on Yong Zhao that you have.

You can visit his site Zhao Learning here to learn more.