Achieving success in today’s world means being able to change while maintaining effectiveness. “Recent experiments show that humans and other animals have a remarkable ability to actively adapt themselves to changing environments” (Kiyohito, 2016, p. 2). Nevertheless, there are times when the willingness to change can become dangerous. Learning just one thing about a particular tool, or just pieces of information about a particular topic, can lead one in the wrong direction. I actually experienced this in action several years ago. For a training, some of the new instructional coaches in my district decided to forgo physical copies of a book and use video instead. At this time, using video as an instructional tool was a fairly new idea. The book being used for the training was The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. An animated video was found that seemed to provide an interesting way of sharing the book so the link was saved and used for the training. During the training, the video was played and about halfway through, it became extremely inappropriate. Someone had intentionally created this video for someone to use hoping they would not fully review it before doing so. That is exactly what happened and the trainers learned a valuable lesson. Nigel Paige (n.d.) says that we should be able to “take insight from outside...and turn it into action”. These trainers were attempting to adapt to a changing environment, however, they lacked the knowledge of potential dangers of doing so. In the end, they were resilient and were ultimately able to adapt to this new tool and environment. This is, in large part, a set of skills that need to be fostered in students today. To set them up for success, they must develop the ability to adapt but with a full understanding of why they are adapting and what they are adapting to.
References
Paine, N. (n.d.). What is a Learning Culture? Retrieved November 14, 2020, from https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/html5/html5lib/v2.84.4/mwEmbedFrame.php/p/2167581/uiconf_id/39959791/entry_id/1_gx0c5869?wid=_2167581
Kiyohito, I. (2016). Adaptive learning and decision-making under uncertainty by metaplastic synapses guided by a surprise detection system. ELife, 5http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/10.7554/eLife.18073