CRITICAL EDUCATION

NEWINGTON COLLEGE HEADMASTER MICHAEL PARKER IS USING CRITICAL THINKING TO TEACH HIS STUDENTS HOW TO LEARN.

- WENDY KAY

NAME:

Michael Parker

COMPANY:

Newington College

POSITION:

Headmaster

LOCATION:

Sydney, Australia

Michael Parker remembers all too clearly the day he failed a class. Not as a pupil, but in his current role as Headmaster of Sydney’s Newington College. He was teaching when his lesson in fake news took an unexpected turn. Somehow, he’d managed to convince a quarter of the Year 7 class that it was possible the world was flat. “I walked out thinking, ‘How did I achieve that?’” he recalls.

Michael’s seemingly impossible achievement emerged after using American basketballer Kyrie Irving’s infamous flat-Earth comments and pointing his class to a “ridiculous” website that backed up the claims. “I went, ‘Ha, ha, ha, look at the way the website is twisting the idea,’” he says. “Anyway, they had a bit of a browse through it, only to turn around and say, ‘Actually, there’s something in this.’

“I’m going, ‘No, no, no! Don’t think that!’ But I took a poll at the end of class and a quarter of the kids thought not that the Earth was flat, but that it was possible the Earth was flat. It was a case of fake news spreading faster than real news. Probably my most failed lesson ever.”