Yesterday, I blogged about the Season of Discontent. Through other exchanges, I was reminded of Brett Moller, an Australian educator who has just quit his day job as a teacher. One only had to visit his web empire to know that he was the type of teacher we want in our children’s classrooms. Yet, he encountered to many reasons why he shouldn’t reinvent and adapt his classrooms to stay.
But, as Wesley Fryer recently explained, those discontented with the wave of stagnation that holds us back, need battle banners. We need an alternative that we can talk about — loudly. We need bullet points. We need speaking points, that we can hammer. Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century was written to counter the three bullets of literacy, the three Rs. In the book, I describe the four Es of literacy (tried to keep it to three).
This morning, I woke up about 3:30 AM, which is pretty normal for me. It’s an A.D.D. thing that we wake up early, and can’t get back to sleep because the thoughts start come, and bouncing around, and crossing and intersecting in strange and irrational ways, but sometimes crossing and intersecting in interesting and useful ways. This morning, I started thinking about a model for education to counter the old, industrial model. I’m going to try to remember it all here. This makes sense to me, which may mean very little to you. But I’m also going to make this available as a Word file and as a wiki page, so that you can hack it too.
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- Published-Print Information
- Information Exists in containers (books, newspapers, bookshelves, libraries)
- Work the same job or profession for 20 to 35 years.
- Socially and environmentally stable (relatively)
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- Information is digital, networked, overwhelming, and exists without containers
- Job niches emerge and become obsolete in only a few years.
- A time of rapid social, environmental, cultural, and technological change
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- Produce a workforce that can be worked
- Prepare students for a future of security
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- Produce a citizenry that can specialize and adapt
- Prepare students for a future of opportunity
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- Literacy standards — 3 Rs (Reading, Writing, Arithmetic)
- Academics
- Deep Academics — for professions
- Shallow Academics and vocations — for skilled workers
- Shallow Academics — for laborers
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- Literacy Standards — 4 Es (Exposing Knowledge/Truth, Employing Information, Expressing ideas compellingly, and Ethical Context)
- Academics
- Shallow Academics for establishing a common context for citizenry
- Academic Excursions — Individuals and groups of students embark on guided but self-directed learning adventures to make themselves experts on a topic of interest and to produce information products designed to accomplish goals.
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- Delivering content and skills
- Guided practice of discrete skills and components of content
- Producing formated reports and presentations on components of content
- Student learn to be taught
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- Deliver content and skills
- Technology-supported practice for mastery
- Use of literacy skills to conduct independent learning adventures
- Individual and team produced information products designed around an area of gained expertise with a specific audience and a specific goal
- Student learn to teach themselves
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Assess what students have been taught |
Assess what students can teach themselves and what they can do with it |
Your Turn:
Great ideas. I have already been hacking away on the wiki to add som library/infomancy ideas. Thank you for getting the ball rolling!
This is brilliant – so much easier to move away from something when you have something to move towards. It’s also directly in line with what those concerned about workforce development have been calling for.
It seems to me that there’s a dimension missing, however, and that’s the larger community. In an industrial model, all activity takes place within the factory, just as learning has been taking place within the confines of the school walls. In a modern, networked world, however, work can take place anywhere, and team members and resources are pulled in as needed. In a similar vein, good learning calls on the resources of the larger community, whether that community is geographic or virtual. Big Picture Schools have shown the power of working with the community, from having parents co-apply with their children to allying with businesses to host internships for the majority of the eligible student body.
Is this outside the scope of the model, or does it have a place?
I think that you are right here, Bret. It is certainly part of my vision that the division between the classroom and the students’ outer experiences will become transparent. I even suggest that the school day will decrease to 3.5 to 4 hours a day, and that students will spend much more of their outside the classroom time engaged in what we now call homework. But homework will become something else entirely. List to my podcast, episode 50, where I ask teachers about their visions of the classroom 10 years from now. I close with my own vision.
The podcast is at:
http://connectlearning.davidwarlick.com/
Later!
Not a bad point, although there is a lot of room to argue about “what is the necessary baseline”. I would argue that most of what I was taught through high school (and many students never learned) is necessary baseline information.
So where do you find an objective way to separate the necessary from the unnecessary stuff, and where does “how to put a condom on a banana” fit in the spectrum? It might be nice to imagine a school that had no political or social impact on its pupils, but hard to design a system that worked that way consistently.
Good point. How do we determine the basics, when it comes to content, in order to achieve the common context. I’m reluctant say that we need to create a list of facts and assure that all students have learned these facts. The world of life-long-learning simply doesn’t work that way. Of course, I think we can get away with a little bit of teaching to the standards. But at this point, so far out from any kind of education system described in the model, we might find some useful ideas by picturing what some might view as a utopian education system.
I keep coming back to education as conversation in my thinking, not just the one-way conversation from teacher to student, but somehow engaging the classroom in a conversation with their communities (local and broad). A talented and prepared teacher can guide that conversation so that at voting time, students will want to explore democracy, and the colonial period of the U.S. and even the experiements in Athens.
I don’t know the answer. I simply do not believe that we will prepare children harness the opporunities of a rapidly changing world by treating them like machines to be assembled based on a master blueprint.