Brain teasers: putting up a fight

• Autor(a) principal: Martins, Cláudia
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/18104
• topic: Traditional education; Modern school; Critical thinking

Our underlying question echoes the concern of many teachers: how can we motivate today’s students in our increasingly technological era? Considering that the current educational system dates back to the Industrial Revolution, it is wholly unfit to grapple with students’ interests and engagements. There are scholars who liken the educational organisation to an assembly line, according to which pupils are grouped in a class by “date of manufacture”, disregarding all personal traits and constraints that necessarily distinguish all students from Basic Education to Higher Education. Despite growing discussions and numerous attempts to change systems throughout the world, we are still obsessed with the use of coursebooks, with standardising testing, with the distinction between bright/ academic/ high-mark and non-bright/ non-academic/ low-mark students and with a number of unfathomable dichotomies. We seek to discuss a number of inconsistencies we perceive in the Portuguese education system and how they may hamper an up-to-date educational approach and prevent the dethroning of the prevailing mainstream education paradigm. The current Finnish system, considered to be among the best in the world, may serve as the role model, stressing out that standardisation does not equal quality no more than frenetic evaluation equals acquisition of knowledge and lifelong skills. Critical thinking may entail the answer and enable us as teachers to tease students’ brains, as well as ours, bringing in a sense of purpose and the bigger picture to have a saying in the game. But will a selection of classroom strategies and activities that bring about critical thinking suffice if we are confronted with a blind administrative and bureaucratic monster? Can teachers and students alike put up a fight? Can our brains be teased into forward motion?