Denise Pontrelli
CEO PartnerED
(Adapted from Will RIchardson)
We believe all kids are natural learners, and that they are driven to learn by personal passions and questions and play, not by extrinsic rewards or contrived contexts.
We believe that while most schools are trying their best to “educate” the students they serve, what a modern “education” now requires is not what traditional schooling systems continue to provide.
We believe we know what is required for deep and powerful learning that sticks for learners, but that there is a huge disconnect between what we believe and know about learning and what we consistently practice in schools.
We believe that the Web and the technologies that we use to access it are dramatically changing and amplifying our ability to learn on our own, and that moving forward, learning will be more self-determined and self-organized by the learner.
We believe that the current legacy system of education is increasingly ineffective and irrelevant, and to quote Russell Ackoff, that we are “trying to do the wrong thing right” in schools. This exhausts our teachers and our students. Communities want and expect more.
We also believe, however, that schools and teachers can play an incredibly important role in the lives of kids and communities, but those roles are moving away from content expertise and delivery to learning expertise and practice.
We believe that there are fundamentally new skills and literacies that our children will need to flourish in the world, ones that currently find little place in the experience of schooling.
We believe that all of this makes this an amazing time to be a learner, but it also makes it perhaps the most challenging time to be in education…EVER.
Finally, we believe that we must and that we can change the experience of schooling to better serve our children in the modern world, but that we will have to summon a higher level of commitment and courage on the part of educators, parents, communities, and policy makers to effectively do so. We need to begin to be “dealers in hope’ for our children.
Followed by the video clip on the same page of “I Believe….” which is his Ted Talk that we watched over about a year ago at ECSU…
