This book is about disobedience. Positive disobedience. Disobedience as a kind of professional behaviour. It shows how teachers can survive and even influence an education system that does staggering damage to potential. 

More importantly it is an arm around the shoulder of disobedient teachers who transform people’s lives, not by climbing promotion ladders but by operating at the grassroots.

Disobedient Teaching tells stories from the chalk face. Some are funny and some are heartbreaking, but they all happen in New Zealand schools.

This book says you can reform things in a system that has become obsessed with assessment and tick-box reporting. It shows how the essence of what makes a great teacher is the ability to change educational practices that have been shaped by anxiety, ritual and convention.

Disobedient Teaching argues the transformative power of teachers who think and act. 

 A book about what is important to learn in the future.

This book concerns only what’s worth learning before professional specialization.

It mainly has to do with the first dozen years or so of education.

What’s worth learning is a fundamental problem for education today,

Likely to matter in the lives that learners are likely to live.

“These ideas are fundamental to our understanding of the world; they figure centrally in science, history, mathematics, literature.”

However, what if many of these ideas, central though they might be to particular disciplines or professions, hardly ever come up in significant ways in the lives that most learners are likely to live? Are they truly worth learning?

Maybe they are worth learning in some intrinsic sense, that is, good to know in principle. But that answer works only if they stay known.

The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives—personal, artistic, civic, something else.

What’s worth learning?

Beyond basic skills—twenty-first-century skills and dispositions

Beyond the traditional disciplines—renewed, hybrid, and less familiar disciplines.

Beyond discrete disciplines—interdisciplinary topics and problems

Beyond regional perspectives—global perspectives, problems, and studies

Beyond mastering content—learning to think about the world with the content.

Beyond prescribed content—much more choice of what to learn

A book about how we should use time in some very different ways in our learning institutions in order to make learning truly timeless

What we don't do is let a strategic plan get in the way of doing work that helps us invent something that we haven't done before.

Supporting the explorers, the pioneers, and the settlers is critical in the initial phases of change, but once staff move past the euphoria of initial change startup, that's when the hard work begins. When everyone settles into change routines, they tend to lose that early momentum.

The evolution of learning culture is the most critical work educators need to do inside schools today.

School culture remains a relatively compliance‐driven system even with our best efforts to change that.

The only way to change culture is to constantly create situations in which people together respond to the question “Why are we here?”

For radical and deep change to occur, progressive education can't be a point in time. It can't be just tinkering around the edges of change. It can't be characterized as the latest fad.

Schools became their own educational version of the Machine Age driven by measurement, assembly‐line curricula, “cells and bells” design, and obedience by classroom management and corporal punishment. Schools became “cults of efficiency,” pushing children, teachers, and administrators farther and farther apart, each generation of educators selected for their capability to ensure compliance within the hierarchy.

The twenty‐first century world rapidly changes around our schools, and swirls around our children: smart machines, globalization, climate change, geopolitical conflict, and economic shifts…….sustaining schooling as it has existed will not prepare our children for the world they will enter as adults.

We must help them be ready for a world none of us can define, but that we all know will look nothing like the recent past.

Kids today need the chance to design, create, and communicate, all highly desirable competencies in this century.

What would school look like if learning did not slow down? What kind of experiences in school creates exponential learning? What are the challenges and risks in teaching without a linear text, a scripted program, or standardized curricula? What do learners and teachers need from the system to mitigate risks and support stepping away from mass standardization? Are there, in your opinion, dispositions of educators that work for or against their success in progressive school communities?

 A book about the rate of change in the world, how quickly we adapt to that change and the implications for us in society.

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once.

The only exponential we ever experience is when something is accelerating, like a car, or decelerating really suddenly with a hard braking. And when that happens you feel very uncertain and uncomfortable for a short period of time.”

“The world is not just rapidly changing,” adds Dov Seidman, “it is being dramatically reshaped—it is starting to operate differently” in many realms all at once. “And this reshaping is happening faster than we have yet been able to reshape ourselves, our leadership, our institutions, our societies, and our ethical choices.”

By 1900, it was taking twenty to thirty years for technology to take one step big enough that the world became uncomfortably different.

“Now, in 2016,” he added, “that time window—having continued to shrink as each technology stood on the shoulders of past technologies—has become so short that it’s on the order of five to seven years from the time something is introduced to being ubiquitous and the world being uncomfortably changed.”

There is a competing curve,” Teller explained. “This is the rate at which humanity—individuals and society—adapts to changes in its environment.” These, he added, can be technological changes (mobile connectivity), geophysical changes (such as the Earth warming and cooling), or social changes (there was a time when we weren’t okay with mixed-race marriages, at least here in the United States). “Many of those major changes were driven by society, and we have adapted. Some were more or less uncomfortable. But we adapted.” Indeed, the good news is that we’ve gotten a little bit faster at adapting over the centuries, thanks to greater literacy and knowledge diffusion. “The rate at which we can adapt is increasing,” said Teller. “A thousand years ago, it probably would have taken two or three generations to adapt to something new.” By 1900, the time it took to adapt got down to one generation. “We might be so adaptable now,” said Teller, “that it only takes ten to fifteen years to get used to something new.” Alas, though, that may not good enough.