In the UK some local authorities are working flat out to come up with designs for schools that will stand the test of time for the next thirty years. The UK government's Building Schools for the Future programme set out in 2003 with the grand vision to replace the secondary school stock throughout England over a fifteen year period.
Similar programmes are underway in other countries. Ask different people what the key characteristics of such schools will be and there are as many views as there are learners that will attend these schools.
It is clear that a single characteristic or feature is unlikely to dominate but there might well be a small number of vital ones - use the poll below to choose the three that appear to be the most important to you.
What society wants from the education system is changing all the time although for many it still appears to provide more or less the same diet as we have seen for the past hundred years or so.
We are in a connected world and there are resources for learning in all sorts of formats along with the opportunity to communicate and collaborate with individuals and groups from around the world. Never before has there been something that had such an impact on the education process as has the advance in technology and the internet. We need to think carefully about how the use of technology will affect the design and delivery of the curriculum in our schools.
The question is how much will the curriculum be allowed to change? How much can we accommodate these new ways or working and how ready are our pedagogues to accomodate the use of technology to allow the changes to take root?
Some would suggest that nothing much will change. The subjects we are used to have been around for ages. Others argue that young people now have more choice than they have ever had and that the social networks and other communities online will be the future for formal education.
Most probably we will end up somewhere between the two extremes. We will probably have schools for a long time to come, they will have teachers (but perhaps fewer specialists), we will have more adults working with kids (teaching assistants and mentors from outside the school etc), we will have online spaces (but these may be simply extensions of a particular classroom and not dynamic communities). We are already seeing a mix of provision with some internships or work placements as part of the learner's programme and we are seeing ideas for building the curriculum to deliver the standards that seem to be a political imperative and yet have been formed into a more project based structures.
The nature of educational change is that it is normally a slow process. That said the rapid development of alternatives as technological provides interesting and attractive alternatives will result in huge pressure to speed the change process. We await with interest the results.
The photograph below shows the timetable - not a list of subject sessions one after the other but a series of advisory sessions to support learners with their personalised programmes. Subject knowledge does feature in the study programmes but they are shaped to apply to the particular requirements. Where a number of students are following programmes that require the same knowledge base then they are taught as a group.
It was launched in 2006 and now has around 140,000 documents in its database. A browse of the groups contained within Scribd shows the extent of the collections with some very interesting vintage print adverts, material on Wen 2.0 and even some open text books. Trouble is that, as you might guess the adult section contains the most resources , some 17,000 making it a difficult resource to see used in schools.
Ask a student where they get most of the support for their school coursework and you might expect them to say their teachers.
489 students responded to a poll in our online learner community and they produced some interesting results.
Q. Where do you get most of your information to support your coursework?
School Intranet 1.23% (6 votes)
The Internet (Via Google etc) 51.12% (250 votes)
Teachers during lessons 37.83% (185 votes)
Online Learning Space 2.86% (14 votes)
Other Students 6.95% (34 votes)
Total number of votes: 489
The results pose some interesting questions. Should we be pleased that so many are using the web or should we be concerned that so many are turning to the web rather than their teachers? There are a number of possible reactions to this sort of information. Firstly are we actually preparing learners for the effective use of the web or do they simply decide that they can find most things they need from this source?
How many courses in schools actually teach the efficient use of the web and effective searching and citation. Many teachers say that a large number of students tend to produce the same sort of information when using the web for coursework and in some cases the teachers can actually tell which web sites students have used. Is this a good or bad thing? Are there skills that learners need to be taught and are our teachers knowledgable to teach those skills?
Loads of questions but very few answers. We are only beginning to unpick the implications of all this for education and the approriate curriculum for the 21 century learner - interesting to speculate where it is all going.
Schools have not changed much in their appearance for a hundred years or more.
The Futurlab publication 'Re thinking learning spaces' provides a useful tool to explore the issues surrounding changing the nature of the formal school experience in terms of the accommodation needed along with the training of staff and the structure of the curriculum.
I have used the materials in a number of situations to engender a debate about creating fit for purpose in the 21st Century. The sessions have ranged from groups of headteachers through to newly qualified teachers and they each bring a new perspective in the issues surrounding school design.
More work needs to be done and the next group will involve learners - a critical perspective in any rethinking of formal schooling. The issues faced by headteachers are many and varied but key in UK schools, and I guess all other schools world wide, is to ensure that the standards are maintained against whatever measures exist in the particular country or state. At the same time everyone recognises that the needs of young people are changing and that traditional curriculum may not fit the bill.
In my work with headteachers they were asked to work in groups to discuss a series of What if.... statements such as; What if school was optional or What if classrooms had more adults present. They were asked to indicate which of these were achievable with little or no change to accommodation, training or curriculum, which required changes to one or more and which they felt had little to do with the formal school system.
The results (results in SVG format and as pdf file) were very interesting and demonstrated that much can be achieved if only there is the will to do it - one of the most critical issues is staff development as much of what is desired depends on changing the ways we work. The comments arising from discussions were also collated and summerised.
Interesting that in some other research that has been done the amounts of funding allocated to training staff are a tiny percentage of the overall budgets in the majority of schools!
One thing that Google does not do is allow you to visualise the web, your searches or, as far as I know, use other inputs than text.
LivePlasma does a similar thing for music and film (or nearly) enter an artists name or the name of an actor and a set of dynamic links appear mapping out the interconnections between the searched for artist.
A number of search engines convert their results into a dynamic map of linked keywords. Quintura provides a map and the search results side by side. One I particularly like actually gives you rewards and more functions the better use you make of the search engine. Ujiko rewards your searching with points. With every 10 points, you move to the next level. They say that 'Your search engine is mutating, new buttons appear giving you access to advanced features (search video, images, news, encyclopedia, advanced filters, animated skins, web archive, traffic details...)'
This would seem to undermine Dan Pink's analysis of the changing nature of the aptitudes we need to develop as an improvement or promotion of more right brain thinking. To be fair Dan Pink does make it clear that both hemispheres of the brain as still important and the aptitudes associated with the left hemisphere are still vitally important, just that we need to recognise the importance of those attributes that are often cited as right brain ones.
Alistair Smith does confirm that the left and right hemispheres contain areas which perform specific functions and they differ in the way they process information, For example, the right deals with more global 'big picture' interpretations while the left deals with more local (detailed) ones. Alistair uses this example to demonstrate that the two work in concert and produce an integrated information processing system with each half making its contribution to the overall interpretation of a particular experience.
Dan Pink's arguments can be presented without the left/ right brain issue getting in the way as what he is pointing out is a need for particular competencies requiring more attention. Certainly there is a shift toward curriculum models that provide for a wider range of assessment types than we have been used to through SAT's so the debate. Alistair points out that educators and scientists are asking different questions. Therefore it seems sensible to assume that any curriculum that is developed or teaching approach that is adopted can only really be informed by drawing on the analysis and research undertaken by both to inform future approaches.
Many educators are concerned about the way in which students seem to accept the results thrown up by Google as the ultimate truth and there are major efforts in the UK to raise the level of web literacy for students and educators alike.
Understanding what you are looking at, knowing its origin and whether the content is valid is a 21st century skill for learners of any age. We have never been in the quite the position of having to validate the sources of information they way we do now.
Many of us are used to paper based publications which have ISBN numbers, known publishers and which are subject to peer review or scrutiny by peers prior to piublication and we are often told something about the author. This is not the case for the web and search engines like Google. A colleague of mine created a situation in a school which was filmed for Teacher's TV - a UK service sharing practice and ideas within the teaching profession.
This film says it all. If the film does not run or you have difficulties you can access it here.
There are a number of Information Literacy resources available on the web and it is vital that we make kids safe, not by blocking access to things or preventing them using the web, but by providing them with the information literacy skills that they will need for the future.
Posts
