Learning Live - Chris thompson, green school - Summary

Welcome Good Afternoon my name is Bav I happen to be privileged enough to run two tribes in Pearson one is called Pearson English which is a biggish tribe some of the folks are here and I’m part of a new tribe we’re trying to create called Informal Learning we’ll get my Chief Executive to be convinced about that soon but not more about that today. So onto the inspiring speaker who’s Chris who actually happens to have had the privilege of being part of two big tribes he was part of the gaming industry and revolutionised sports gaming which is Electronic Arts and I’ll let him tell you more about it and the second tribe which he’s part of now which is really what we want to talk about more which is the Green School in Bali which he runs and this is a true story of innovation going from the east to the west and this is one of the most amazing concepts of ecology meeting technology meeting education and we look forward to hearing more. So Green School is a very very unique school pre K prep up to grade 12 in Bali, an international school with over forty different nationalities from people who come from all over the world. In the centre run its about student centred education but the other aspect in all the way through the primary grades we have three adults in every classroom so we have a Lead International Teacher, we have a Lead Indonesian Teacher and the we also have another Teaching Assistant within the classroom so the student teacher ratio at Green School is about six and a half or seven to one. Why do we send our kids to school? Why do we do it ? The model that I basically I grew up with you go to school to get grades, you get good grades you get into a good university, you get into a good university to get a good job, you get a good job you get married you have two kids yeah and everything’s happy and that just doesn’t work we know it doesn’t work. In high school in the United State right now 60% of teachers hate teaching high school, 60%. 60% of students hate being in high school so maybe we could start with that. I wish we could just wipe, I wish we could erase the board, I wish we could get rid of all the Harvards and the Stanfords and just start with a fresh group, that we’re not talking about an industrial model and how we evolve it. How do we start right now and what best for this generation of kids and how do we prevent it from becoming institutionalised, that would be an amazing topic but there’s so much invested in it, in campuses, in physical buildings and structures and this is kind of what’s limiting right now and this is what’s creating a lot of the debt in North America. But technology what do you leverage it at , servers, content, you can change things in an instant , you can change it immediately about where you may want to go. So this is where I think the flexibility of technology is really going to help, help that discussion.