Friday, January 6, 2017

Learning for the future

Over the past few months I've been reading a lot about where people consider the future of education to be heading. I find it interesting to delve into the various perspectives about what education might look like in the future and would like to share some of these.

The first is a summary of some key points from a webinar discussion between two key players in the world of education and learning, Ken Robinson and Peter Senge. Their discussion was entitled 'Learning for the Future' and offered the following snippets:
- Schools are still the answer. What we have to re-think is what a 'school' is.
- It's not that (some) students don't want to learn, its that they don't want to learn the way that we're teaching.
- Schools as communities of learners: We learn from each other - learning is a social act. It is deeply personal and inherently collective (I love this quote). Learning for the future involves learning what it means to think together, to act together.
- Schools are organised the way they are because of the technologies available at the time.
- Just as in an agricultural model of farming, too much emphasis on the yield, output and results will eventually destroy the soil and land beneath the surface. The same metaphor applies to learning. Too much focus on output, results and the yield will eventually destroy the 'story of learning' that exists as part of the culture.

I'm also currently reading through Future Wise: Educating our Children for Changing World by David Perkins. He offers the following six broad trends that are pushing the boundaries of what's taught and the way it's taught:

(1) Beyond basic skills - 21st Century skills and dispositions: There appears to be a global trend converging towards the cultivation of critical and creative thinking, collaborative skills and dispositions, leadership, entrepreneurship and the related skills and dispositions that speak strongly  to living and thriving in our era.

(2) Beyond the traditional disciplines - renewed, hybrid, and less familiar disciplines: Themes such as bioethics, ecology, recent ideas from psychology and sociology, and other areas that address opportunities and challenges of our times.

(3) Beyond discrete disciplines - interdisciplinary topics and problems: Many curricula introduce students to daunting, contemporary problems of an emphatically interdisciplinary character, such as the causes and possible cures of poverty or the trade-offs of different energy sources.

(4) Beyond regional perspectives - global perspectives, problems, and studies: Attention not just to local or national but also to global matters, for instance, world history or the global interactive economic system or the possible meanings of global citizenship.

(5) Beyond mastering content - learning to think about the world with the content: Educators are encouraging learners not just to master content academically but also to notice where content connects to life situations, yields insights, and prompts productive action.

(6) Beyond prescribed content - much more choice of what to learn: In some settings, educators are supporting and coaching learners in choices about what to study well beyond the typical use of electives.

I find it an interesting exercise to reflect on how many, and to what extent, my school is enacting these 'six beyonds'. For some schools, these have been a part of the conversation for many years, yet progress is limited. Others have been shaping the path for some time. It seems to me that more and more these sorts of attributes are becoming more common in school frameworks.

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