T&L Advisor Guest post — Henry Thiele, Assistant Superintendent for Technology and Learning for District 207 in Park Ridge, IL, and keynote speaker for T&L Live Atlanta: As we move into a new era of ESSA, we must take lessons learned from the disassembling of NCLB. The past few decades have focused on standards, accountability, and higher level thinking in education. The common visualization used to legitimize these goals has been the pyramid of Bloom's Taxonomy. But, under NCLB, schools have focused on only one of the three domains of learning in Bloom's Taxonomy: Cognitive. What about the other two domains of learning, Psychomotor and Affective? How have educators reached the mind, body, and heart of each student? We have failed at reaching all children and really changing education because as a profession we have focused on only one of the three parts of the whole child. This has resulted in what I call, “The Investment Gap.” It’s time to close that gap and invest more of our efforts into the other two domains. To become a change agent, and really impact each individual student you serve, there needs to be a connection beyond content, beyond learning, that reaches the whole person you are helping to learn. Until that happens, the most you can ever expect to get out of a student is compliance and cooperation. It isn't until you reach students on a human level that they will begin to value and identify with the skills and content you are offering. Once that happens, you can become an agent of change.
