A baby born in Wellington in 2013 will be in the high school graduating class of 2031.
What are the implications of this startling reality for professional educators? Perhaps a scenario might shed light on this question. Imagine that a task force composed of scientists, anthropologists, educators, business leaders, artists and technology designers is visiting schools across your country. Their charge is to ascertain the approximate year for which students are being prepared. They come to your school.
To inform their findings, they analyse artifacts such as your curriculum, the daily schedule in which you operate, the length of the school year, the way students are grouped for instruction, meeting patterns of the faculty and access to digital and media tools. A very revealing form of evidence is what assessments are valued, because what is assessed is one of the drivers of school decision-making. After reviewing the artifacts, it is unlikely that the task force will determine that learners are being prepared for five or ten years from now. Are we content with that reality?
Each day children walk through the school doors, educators are expected to prepare them for the future. As Sir Ken Robinson suggests:
“All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds and a willingness to take risks with what they think,” he says. “Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests…Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world.” All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think,” he says. “Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests …Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world.”
As of this writing 13% of the 21st century is over, yet our school schedules work within the confines of the agrarian calendar of the 19th century. I submit that teachers and administrators will make the transition to embrace digital, media and global literacies much faster than our institutions. It will take longer for schools to shed dated structures which will prove a great but necessary challenge. Becoming a contemporary school will require a genuine rethinking of the formats of our programmes regarding the nature of our schedules, the ways we group learners, our personnel configurations and the use of space (both physical and virtual). These latter points are the focus for many educators who are looking for future shifts and I certainly am committed to those efforts. Having said that, in the short term, however, there are actions educators can take to engage the contemporary learner.
Three Actions for Now
It has been my experience that the overwhelming majority of teachers and administrators do not want, nor support, dated conditions. There is nothing that they would like more than to modernise curriculum, provide their learners with the best type of learning experiences, engage them in the apt use of new technologies and create more flexible and dynamic schedules to prompt learning and achievement. I would like to identify three key actions that can assist in moving our schools along the pathway to the present.
- Each teacher should commit to one “upgrade” per unit of study to replace a dated assessment with a contemporary form.
- Each administrator should commit to one “upgrade” to employ for communication with staff and the community.
- Professional development should use revised national standards as an opportunity to modernise curriculum and teaching.
In this article, I will elaborate on each of these points with a specific eye towards how to act on them in order to benefit your learners.
1.Upgrading: One Unit at a Time
When writing curriculum there are three basic elements requiring choices on the part of educators: content, skills and assessments. Every day in classrooms throughout the world, teachers are selecting the “what” students should engage in, that is, the knowledge and essential understandings; the “how” students should process and employ skills to dive into the content; and the “outcome” of the work which will be the products and performances developed by learners. These three elements are mutually dependent. I have proposed a model for upgrading these elements, one unit at a time, to match the needs of our learners. The model is based on the concept of strategic replacement of content, skills and/or assessment in our unit planning. Replacement is a key word, given that the demands on teachers make the idea of adding anything onto the curriculum impossible, but we can substitute and upgrade our practice leading for engaged student learning.
For example, a teacher might take a unit in his fifth grade social studies curriculum on the Thirteen Colonies: Seeds of a Nation. Originally groups of students were to create a poster display on one of the colonies to reflect their knowledge about its geography, native people, settlers and government. The teacher makes an upgrade, so that the poster is replaced. The students will each create a short video-documentary using music, voice-over, images and interviews. Consider a physics teacher at a high school who replaces her textbook description of the laws of physics and asks students to “flip” the classroom with homework and view a Khan Academy video on the laws. Replay them and respond with questions on the class wiki. A kindergarten teacher asks students to create a book using iAuthor on an iPad while they import images and create captions about insects in the school garden. Students studying French set up a monthly Skype session with a class in Paris where students are studying English and have actual real-time conversations.
What criteria constitute a quality upgrade? For the past year, based on workshops and field experience across the county and internationally, I would submit that there are four critical points for teachers to consider when deciding whether to use an application to support student learning.
• The application engages the learner in active inquiry RE- SEARCH and promotes curiosity. Evan, a high school student, is using the application, Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com) in his algebra class to solve a polynomial equation and visualise the steps towards the solution. He finds the application helpful, but what also occurs to Evan, is that he can revisit the site in his social studies class as well.
Currently he is studying life in present day China. Evan researches the statistics on China using the Wolfram Alpha application and queries its per capita income, the life expectancy of its citizens and its population size. Questions naturally emerge from his study: What was going on in the last forty years of history to account for the economic changes in China? What accounts for certain cities having huge population surges versus other cities in China? He decides to run additional statistics on Wolfram Alpha on neighboring countries in Asia: India, Singapore, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam. Evan is motivated to raise further questions via the power of this application.
• Investigation using the application deepens the content. Inspired by her teacher, fourth grader, Joanna, is crystal clear that she wants to be an astronomer when she grows up. Her class is studying the solar system and specifically the first moon landing. Joanna’s teacher gave her a digital application, We Choose the Moon to employ in her report (http://wechoosethemoon.org). Joanna is enthralled with the story, the video clips and the ability to go deeper into the content with ease. She is motivated to find details and information, which provides a more complex and deeper sense of the content and issue she is studying.
• Use of the tool generates independence. Providing students with a way and support for improving their own performance independently is one of the great outcomes of strategic use of digital tools. Consider how Billy, a middle schooler, struggles with building up his personal vocabulary when he relies on flashcards, which he often loses. The cards can help, but they are limiting. He has a new teacher this fall, Mr. Jones, who encourages Billy to use VisuWords, an active dynamic visual graphic vocabulary builder finding synonyms and word roots. (http://www.visuwords.com). In addition, each student has his or her own personal vocabulary builder through Vocabulary.com (http://www. vocabulary.com). Billy is expanding his vocabulary with independence and excitement. Gone are the flashcards.
• The quality of work in student performances and products is improved. When we ask our students to produce new media and employ a range of digital tools, the question of quality outcomes should be in the forefront. One effective approach to ensure excellence is collaboratively developed digital and media rubrics. If we ask our students in advance what makes an outstanding podcast both in terms of technical display and content, it is more likely that the student can reflect those criteria in the finished work. Using these tools should go beyond products that are old style in a new format, otherwise we might fall into the trap that Alan November raises: “…we teach students to create paper or do some kind of other work that could have been done without a computer. “ He provides an example, “Too many of our elementary students are memorising the fifty state capitals, when they could be building interactive digital maps of the history of the state capitals.” (November, 2012). In short, quality student 21st century products are directly linked to quality teacher assessment designs.
2. Administrators Updating Leadership Practice
If teachers can make the transition to upgrading and modernising the curriculum then it is critical that administrators make a corresponding shift. I would recommend that each administrator consider replacing a dated leadership approach with a newer one. For example, a superintendent of a school district can run a meeting with faculty and principals using web 2.0 tools like, http://www.todaysmeet.com to get feedback and provide a backchannel for interaction among participants. Instead of always conducting Back to School Night as a “one time only event’, why not have a webinar broadcast for parents who cannot attend? So many parents who work would love to feel part of the community and might miss the evening. In fact, a webinar series for parents might be a real motivator for involvement. The principal and staff members could update each school webpage to be more interactive for the school community with a monthly blog post. Students could become webmasters of the school site and learn critical skills while working with the administration.
When school leadership uses software for curriculum mapping initiatives they are employing a 21st century approach to sharing student learning through web-based communication. Mapping is a concrete and practical approach to document the sequence of units of study through the year in each class. Mapping software provides administrators and teachers access to seeing the flow and sequence of curriculum year to year and across the day. Thus, professionals in a school have immediate access to both agreed upon targets in consensus maps but more importantly the individual teacher’s diary map at any level K-12 in a school. Informed teachers make informed decisions. For those of us who have mapped for years, we see that one source for the gaps we see in our school programmes is the gap in authentic information between teachers. In short, leadership can employ more effective electronic communication both personally and school/district wide by using modern tools.
3. Standards as an Opportunity to Modernise
In New Zealand, Australia and the United States there has been a commitment in the last few years to align local school curriculum to revised and updated standards. In our team’s four-phase model, MTTC (Mapping to the Core: Integrating the Common Core Standards in Your Local School Curriculum), we advocate that the new standards can revitalise a school’s mission.
Rather than viewing the advent and integration of these dynamic standards as an act of “compliance”, educators can view this transition as an opportunity to modernize curriculum and teaching. A critical point to be raised is that standards are not curriculum. Standards do not declare what to teach, how to assess, how to deliver instruction, or even when to deliver lesson plans and unit designs. The details and richness of curriculum planning is left to your local school and district so that you can be responsive to the specific needs of your learners. Our team believes that mapping and laying out the curriculum with embedded standards K-12, being thoughtfully scaffolded, is the key to supporting student learning and achievement.
The newer standards have been vetted and crafted to prepare our contemporary learners to become career and college ready. The words digital, media and global, are laced throughout the standards with significant emphasis featured in ELA standards on “Speaking and Listening” across all subject areas. Consider the following Anchor Standard for all students K-12 which directly declares that our learners starting at the youngest ages needs to make deliberate choices of digital media to generate their ideas and share information. (http://www. corestandards.org) CCSS.ELA-Literacy. CCRA.SL.5 Make strategic use of digital media and visual displays of data to express information and enhance understanding of presentations.
For example, in the Common Core State Standards from the United States, digital and media literacy is featured prominently describing the career and college ready student. These descriptions are really the driving mission of my country’s new standards. There are some particularly revealing phrases for teachers to consider: “…thoughtfully to enhance”; “tailor their searches online”; “familiar with strengths and limitations”. The architects of new national standards are not looking for students to simply jump into tools but rather that:
They use technology and digital media strategically and capably.
Students employ technology thoughtfully to enhance their reading, writing, speaking, listening and language use. They tailor their searches online to acquire useful information efficiently, and they integrate what they learn using technology with what they learn offline. They are familiar with the strengths and limitations of various technological tools and mediums and can select and use those best suited to their communication goals. The invitation to upgrade and to update curriculum and instruction is a clarion call.
To conclude, three actions can be taken by educators to update curriculum and teaching, thus, preparing learners for their future. When teachers replace dated units of study with contemporary content, skills, and assessments, our students are engaged in the “now” of learning. When administrators employ 21st century tools for communication and leading, they model the proficiencies to emulate in classrooms. When states and local schools align their curriculum plans to rigorous standards, the results ripple through all of our educative settings.