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- All Subjects: Thinking
- Creators: Esch, Mark
- Creators: Hermanns, Carl
- Creators: Klewicki, Tallee Jo
It is critical for students to be provided with opportunities to learn in settings that foster their academic growth. It is equally important that schools endeavor to be a place where students’ social and emotional needs are met as well. However, due to lack of funding, over-testing, inappropriate evaluation measures, and other persistent policy pressures, our public schools have often resorted to a focus on raising standardized test scores through direct instruction with an increasingly narrowed curriculum. As a result, schools have often become places in which students, rather than being seen as valued future members of a productive society, are part of the bleak statistics that shine a spotlight on how our schools have failed to motivate and connect with the students of today. Consequently, many educators have come to believe they are not influential enough to make a significant difference, and have resigned themselves to accepting their current situation. The problem with this thinking is that it minimizes the purpose of the job we promised to do – to educate.
The innovation I implemented and describe in my dissertation can be characterized with one word – dialogue. Dialogue that occurs for the purpose of understanding and learning more about that which we do not know. In this innovation, I endeavored to demonstrate how social learning by way of dialogic discussion could not only support students’ academic growth, but their social and emotional growth as well. Results from the data collected and analyzed in this study suggest social learning had a highly positive impact both on how students learned and how they viewed themselves as learners.
Education is one of the cornerstones of our country. Educational opportunities that help meet the academic and social-emotional needs of students should not be seen as a privilege but rather as a fundamental right for all students. Equally, the right to express one’s thoughts, opinions and ideas is a foundational element in our democratic society. Failing to connect with our students and teach them how to exercise these rights in our classrooms is to fail ourselves as educators.
Filmmakers seek to create story pieces that are visually beautiful and engage the full attention of their audience. They typically abide by a 3-step process moving through pre-production, production, and post-production. Within each step, there are a series of tasks that need to be accomplished in order to reach the completed film. A successful film requires careful planning and strategy in pre-production, timely and decisive execution in production, and minimal unforeseen retouching in post-production.<br/><br/>Even though filmmakers have continued to follow the same formula throughout the decades, the filmmaking process has remained largely inefficient. It is extremely common for pre-production planning to be undercut, for production filming to run far too long, and for post-production VFX and editing to send the project over budget. These instances can cause major issues as the project is being finalized. In many scenarios portions of the project need to be reshot, the box office revenue isn’t enough to make up for extensive VFX retouching, or the project may never even come to fruition. <br/><br/>The reason for this recurring theme of films being over budget and out of time is quite simply that technology has made filmmakers lazy. “Fix it in post” is a disgustingly common phrase used in the film industry. It describes the utter abuse of computer retouching in the post-production phase of filmmaking. Despite working in an industry that seeks to entertain the human eye, filmmakers have become blind to all of the small mistakes that could cost them hundreds of hours and millions of dollars in the long run.