2020 teachers
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2011/03/2020-teachers.html
For the teachers who responded to my Twitter questions, there seemed a unanimous view that there will be a sea-change in the way teachers conduct themselves in education, and that teachers will drive these changes. Heidi Siwak, a Grade 6 teacher in Canada predicted: "I’ll spend very little time designing lessons and more time assisting students in meeting their own learning goals." These sentiments are echoed by several others. Martin Homola in Slovakia, said teachers will pay "more attention to specific needs and interests of pupils. Less authority and a friendlier older sibling approach, more discussion." Jack Beaman from the UK wanted to see small groups and a scenario where top experts would "use technology to reach masses allowing people to dictate own learning." He envisaged an education provision that would be "less top down and more social." Another UK teacher, Sonia Cooper, believes there will be a more dialogic kind of pedagogy, with teachers "hopefully talking less to the class, not imparting knowledge, but guiding learners by asking the right questions."
21st Century Education Requires Life wide learning
http://blogs.hbr.org/innovations-in-education/2011/03/21st-century-education-require.html
Why do I believe, after facing decades of resistance to changes in schooling, that shifting our current model of education might now be possible? Educational transformation is coming not because of the increasing ineffectiveness of schools in meeting society’s needs — though that is certainly a good reason — but due to their growing unaffordability. Events of the last few years, and projections of our nation’s economic future, paint a bleak picture of the financial viability of schools as we know them; we can no longer support an educational system based on inefficient use of expensive human labor. These inefficiencies are not simply within the walls of the school, but reflect our lost opportunities to help students learn in all the hours and all the places they spend time outside of classrooms.
Could the Khan Academy Close the Achievement Gap?
http://www.good.is/post/could-the-khan-academy-close-the-achievement-gap
The Khan Academy
http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy
The Khan academy has been getting some well deserved press lately. Salman Khan has a number of simple, but profound ways to present the technical aspects of science and math in a way with leads to some of these other perspectives about the future of education. For instance, instead of sitting in a class, and watching/listening to a lecture, and then spending time at home to do the exercise, Mr. Khan suggests to reverse this, in that the lectures can be watched at home, and the student can stop, and go over any specific parts on his or her own. This would leave the class period as a time and place for teachers to interact with individual students working on problems.
This strikes me as a pretty reasonable way to (really) integrate video into a classroom
Science, Math, and Fan Fiction: What’s Worth Learning?
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/03/science-math-and-fan-fiction-whats-worth-learning
I think one of the problems that curriculum instruction is going to have is the very long sort of industrial model for how curriculum gets organized. It’s over a hundred years old. It’s based on standards and it’s based on shared model of what’s learning. And so in schools you have a model for what’s learned and then all the kids have to go along with that model. And I think the new models that are being developed now are much more production focused where kids integrate what they know into meaningful performances or products. And then the technologies organize around those products both in their production but also in their sharing to give kids a real investment in what they’re building and doing. But the kind of movies or the kinds of machinima or the kinds of production that kids are engaging in does not map very well onto traditional curriculum maps. And so like what happens with chemistry. Well that’s a big problem because kids are engaged in a lot of sophisticated media production practices that don’t really involve chemistry.
There are different kinds of learning goals like a huge part of our education process is cultural inheritance. There’s a whole bunch of knowledge that we think that educated citizens should have and that our schools are designed very efficiently to transmit that knowledge. I mean you can’t teach algebra much better than it’s currently being taught in our schools. And to have game to do it or other kinds of media to do it, it just the new methods are just inefficient compared to what we already have. The question is, or the question for us is that a lot of kids aren’t engaged by algebra or chemistry. They’re engaged by other stuff. And so we can follow the trail of engagement to figure out what kinds of things interest them and are there…are there legitimate academic pursuits to be sort of discerned in…in that form of participation.
Standards and Benchmarks are Crap
http://www.thethinkingstick.com/standards-and-benchmarks-are-crap
Yes….I’ve been thinking this for awhile. I’ve been having an issue with standards and benchmarks (S&B) for years. Specifically how they apply to technology in schools. Read here, here and here.
School has changed; we used to learn "just in case" now we need to be teaching "just in time.” (OK…schools haven’t changed but they should)
The way schools are applying S&B’s is frustrating me…especially in the American system where we’re getting to the point in many schools where everyone is on the same page at the same time learning the same standard. Forget if kids actually master the concept because we need to move on to the next standard.
S&B’s are 20th century thinking that we’re still trying to apply to a 21st Century world. A world where essential habits and attitudes of learning are what we need to be focused on. Where meta-cognitive skills and the ability to think about our own thinking will serve our students better than learning their times tables (I have access to 4 calculators within hands reach as I type).
So the conversation then is what is learning about? And as the tweet above states: What are the essentials of learning?
These are some other educator’s perspectives in this subject. …There are some general notions I could abstract from these posts: (1) there will be a break from rigidly teaching students by age cohort, and as a matter of fact, there is some push to adopt some of the implications of the modern computer world, to help foster a sort of personalized and custom education for each student, (2) the presently ultra progressive teaching strategy of allowing students to have majority control over what they learn may grow with time (within some bounds…). (2) All of these points of view (with the exception of the Khan academy) seem to have as an operative metaphor, social sciences, humanities, and technology classes (that is, using technology, not learning technology) as their model for this future of education…
What about math and sciences? Does the method created by Mr. Khan work to the degree that this will satisfy the ever growing need of r a more technically adept populace? I wonder about this, in that just taking a survey of many of the progressive education blogs run my teachers (something I do almost every day), you can see a strange prejudice against any of the sorts of subjects which (by their nature) demand a (traditional) disciplined approach (i.e. math, many of the sciences, foreign languages, etc.).
In our present world, not even to mention the future, what are some of the basic and fundamental skills which we should have? For instance, I see many of the tech teachers abhorring the fact that students are still ‘forced’ to learn the multiplication tables. They presume that since calculators are seemingly ubiquitous, that there is no need to be able to demonstrate any basic arithmetic mastery. The same goes for math in general, wherein a circular argument is presented (by those who, to make this circular argument more convolute) stating that since students don’t ‘like’ math, that there will be little need for it. The justification is that whoever is making the argument hasn’t felt the need to know any higher math recently.
I can’t resist the obvious and catty retort, that if the presenter of these ideas had taken more math or logic, that this argument might not have been presented.
There also seems to be a preponderance of focus upon a student’s sense of wonder and short term interest, and nearly no focus upon some of the immemorially important skills of self discipline, memorization, rigor, and learning how to master something outside of one’s simple predilections.
So, if you have waded through to this point, I would love to hear what you think the future may bode for teaching, schools, and education in general…in the future.
