Ownership = Success

Posted on | March 24, 2009 | No Comments

The question on every teachers mind has to be how do I package what I teach to get students engaged?

Good question and one that seldom, if ever, gets acted upon!

Once children leave primary school less and less attention is given to the engagement of the student and more and more is attention is given to assessment of the 1% of  information the student actually retains.

Maybe Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University sketch isn’t that far off

Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University the sketch!

So what do we really need to do to make education work today?

No we do not have to, or want to, eliminate rigor, reading, research the hours of labour over a question.

What we need to do is give serious thought to how to give the student ownership of what they are doing.

And by doing I mean an essay, a TV program, an installation piece, a lab.

Ownership is the key to academic success today and has been the key all along!

Only a handful of people ever figure it out and if you take a good look at those who do the best in University and after University it has a lot to do with ownership of what they engaged in!

I have no doubt that this idea of ownership applies to every level of education and is the key to primary school success.

Along the way we lose sight of the ownership variable.

I am teaching a group of girls at Zayed University who have taken ownership to the extreme and in the process are reaping wild success.

The project is simple, get the information of the day out to students.

In this case a hybrid system of blog and podcast is being used.

The project is called ZU60.

The simple remit is to provide 60 seconds of campus information to students every morning.

This is a student owned project!

The students collect, write, edit, record and upload it all and this has to be done for the morning rush!

The students OWN ZU60 and the results… listen and tell me what you think!

The key to success is ownership.

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