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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Our underlying question echoes the concern of many teachers: how can we motivate today’s students
in our increasingly technological era? Considering that the current educational system dates back to
the Industrial Revolution, it is wholly unfit to grapple with students’ interests and engagements. There
are scholars who liken the educational organisation to an assembly line, according to which pupils
are grouped in a class by “date of manufacture”, disregarding all personal traits and constraints
that necessarily distinguish all students from Basic Education to Higher Education. Despite growing
discussions and numerous attempts to change systems throughout the world, we are still obsessed with
the use of coursebooks, with standardising testing, with the distinction between bright/ academic/
high-mark and non-bright/ non-academic/ low-mark students and with a number of unfathomable
dichotomies. We seek to discuss a number of inconsistencies we perceive in the Portuguese education
system and how they may hamper an up-to-date educational approach and prevent the dethroning of
the prevailing mainstream education paradigm. The current Finnish system, considered to be among
the best in the world, may serve as the role model, stressing out that standardisation does not equal
quality no more than frenetic evaluation equals acquisition of knowledge and lifelong skills. Critical
thinking may entail the answer and enable us as teachers to tease students’ brains, as well as ours,
bringing in a sense of purpose and the bigger picture to have a saying in the game. But will a selection
of classroom strategies and activities that bring about critical thinking suffice if we are confronted
with a blind administrative and bureaucratic monster? Can teachers and students alike put up a fight?
Can our brains be teased into forward motion?
Description
Keywords
Traditional education Modern school Critical thinking
Citation
Martins, Cláudia Susana Nunes (2017). Brain teasers: putting up a fight. In II Encontro Internacional de Formação na Docência (INCTE): Livro de atas. Bragança: Instituto Politécnico de Bragança. p. 87-94. ISSN 978-972-745-222-4
Publisher
Instituto Politécnico de Bragança