Weekly Reflection #1 – Reflections From Most Likely to Succeed Film

When watching the “Most Likely to Succeed” film I had no idea of what to expect as there are a lot of ideas and theories out there on what makes a person likely to succeed so there was a wide range of possibilities for this video. I found this film quite interesting and I had a lot of those “wow I never would’ve thought of that” moments when watching the film. The film revolves around a high school in California called High Tech High. The teachers who work in this school are given creative freedom with their lesson planning and they don’t have to follow the curriculum as other teachers do. The high school focuses more on learning through experience and less on reading a textbook then testing and moving on. I always see different ideas on how we can encourage more critical thinking in our schools and get away from the base of memorizing, writing it down, then most likely forgetting what you learned.

I found it really interesting how this high school took it to a whole new level. There is no testing in this high school and students are assessed more through discussions and how they take on bigger tasks such as directing a play. While there may be a few downsides to how this school is run and its students taught, I thought many of their strategies would be very useful to apply in other schools to encourage more critical thinking with their students. I think the way they put their students into leadership roles and put a bit more emphasis on group work really gives them more preparation for the world outside of school and dealing with stressful situations throughout school as well as outside of school.

Critical thinking is a very important tool to have within your toolbox for every aspect of life. I think giving students more freedom with their work and almost giving them less direction in sense would be an effective method to build more critical thinking skills, as shown in the film “Most Likely to Succeed.” In the discussion shown at the beginning of the video they seem to use the Socratic method (explained in the video “This tool will help improve your critical thinking – Erick Wilberding“) to get their students thinking when first being introduced to one another. Here you can watch a video about improving critical thinking using the Socratic method.  Giving them less direction and giving them the opportunity to decide for themselves what the best path would be and thinking about the path they want to take gives them more to think on rather than “here’s what I need you to do and I want you to take these steps to do it”.  

              I never really was never encouraged to take on leadership positions or given more autonomy with my schoolwork, I was more told what to do and the steps I needed to take to get there. While I enjoyed having clear steps in front of me to meet an objective at the time, I feel it would have been beneficial to have had to brainstorm and get more creative with schoolwork rather than doing exactly as I was told to do. I now get a bit more freedom with work in my studies and almost feel at a loss and panic because I don’t know exactly what to do and need to use a bit more critical thinking for assignments. With these experiences in mind, I want to take some ideas from the film into my future teaching such as giving students more freedom with how they accomplish tasks and letting them come up with their own answers so they can hopefully develop more critical thinking.