Saturday, August 27, 2011

Making a difference

This week I visited the Avenue Scholars Foundation in Omaha. Jef Johnston their chief operating officer said something that resonated with me. Referring to recruiting diverse teachers he said (I am paraphrasing here): this problem is solvable, if it has not been solved yet it is because they don't really want to.
I found this approach to be very much inline with my feelings about many of the problems I encounter in teacher education.
At the heart of it it is a design problem- not the external shiny stuff but design in the full sense of the word- the way someone like Steve Jobs would use it:




In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.









Steve Jobs


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