This video is made by Google and is being used for one of the questions in the application for Google Teachers Academy Sydney. I love the message that this video brings of aiming for the tenfold improvements.
By aiming for such massive improvements, you have to start again and completely rethink how it could happen. It takes away the ability to just tinker around the edges as this will only bring minor improvements.
Imagine if this was a regular mode of thinking for our students. It tends to come natural to kids – how often do we dismiss their ideas as nonsensical, impossible to pull off?
What If Qs from Room 13 at Willow Park School
What if we actually encouraged this type of thinking? I have written before about developing students natural curiosity. If this was nurtured, what could they achieve? If this ability actually grew throughout school, what impact could they eventually have on society? What if all that curiosity, creativity, innovation, moonshot thinking was unleashed on the issues facing the world today?
Perhaps those impossible, wicked problems would not be so wicked after all.
This post is Day 28 of My Questioning Quest.
Steve Mouldey 
Great video, and great concept.
Thanks for the reference – I am pleased you found some inspiration in the application. We certainly need more of this type of thinking at a teacher, leader and learner level.
What if assessment structures included a portfolio of “Moonshot” thinking?
If you taught a generation of students that then eventually when they became violently disillusioned by their actual overall powerlessness in life they would get angry and cause a lot of social instability and maybe even violence and they would be easy prey for some strong man who would come along and tell them that they could avenge the society that denied them their rightful place by following him.
That’s my theory. It’s based on anecdotal evidence from my own personal experience and observation of other young educated middle class people in who despite being told they would one day “change/save the world” can’t even get jobs.
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