The Schools We Need
Essential Questions
- What kinds of schools do we need today?
- What should teacher leaders be emphasizing in today’s schools?
- What educational trends are most worthy of our attention?
- What does my dream learning and teaching environment look like?
- How does it compare with my current school, practice and the dreams of my colleagues and/or students?
- What’s working in schools today?
- What models are school leaders exploring and implementing?
It was interesting to consider the question, “what kinds of schools do we need today,” while reading the five stages of grief (Kubler-Ross, 1969) in Mass Customized Learning. The reality is that most of the world does not think educators are doing a good job. I may have gone through the full gamut, and am back to the bargaining stage when it comes to education, imagining what we are doing well and trying to find isolated reasons for education being broken. I’ve been a long time fan of Sir Ken Robinson, so it was nice to revisit his key idea that we’re an “industry” teaching in a bureaucratic Industrial Age when we’re living in an Information Age world, and are preparing students for an unknown future.(Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms) We need schools that meet learners at their readiness level, accommodate personal learning preferences, and have content that is relevant to students’ interest in real-world ways.
What we need in schools is the cross industry learning or, “the capacity to routinely customize products and services to meet the specific needs and/or desires of individuals without adding significantly to the cost of the product or service.” (Mass Customized Learning, p.3) I think the model at AltSchool is a great jumping off place for personalizing education as they are using playlists that are not only customized and real-time, but also use “recommendation engines” like Amazon and Apple do.(AltSchool) My first inkling was a concern for civil liberties, and I don’t think we need to be barcoding kids, but I believe we have to reframe our thinking in order to undo a century’s worth of thinking about education.
Sugatra Mitra is a fantastic teacher leader to model our work after. (Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud) His thoughts about how education now is “producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists,” supports the reality that we barely understand many of the jobs that exist today, therefore we can not know what skills need to be taught for future jobs. I don’t believe teachers are obsolete, but I do use the “I Don’t Know” pedagogy in my classroom and find it works. Students are used to getting answers faster than the click of a button, so me being another answer giver (just slower) is not my job. I like turning questions around to students and asking, “How do you think we could figure that out?” Often they grumble, and it’s a bit of a joke, “Oh great, Ms. Johnson’s making us THINK again!” However, if knowledge is anachronistic, and thinking is our current goal, a teacher’s role is to help students organize their own learning.
As evidenced by my study of AltSchool in Learning Task #4 this week (Learning Task #4) I am a big fan of the work they are doing. It’s no surprise that Max Ventilla, the AltSchool founder, was inspired by Mr. Mitra’s “School in the Cloud” where anyone, anywhere, anytime, can be the master of his or her own learning. My school is a WEB 2.5 school in my estimation. Assets is past the 2.0 level in a lot of ways, such as student directed learning, with the mindset that we are just the jumping off point for learning, but we are not yet masters at the 3.0 level, where learning flows openly in all directions. It feels to me like my school is trying a lot of the trends in education, but we’re not quite focused enough to be excellent or models of any one vision. My dream school exhibits true individualization for our students, and I think Assets aims on this concept. (Mission & Vision)
Personalized learning is an educational approach in which teachers and schools create systems, tools, and methodologies that tailor instruction to the individual needs, skills, and interests of each student, in an effort to accelerate and deepen learning. An outlier is defined as something that lies outside of the main body or group that it’s a part of. Malcom Gladwell marked being an outlier as a solid predictor of success in his bestselling book. (Outliers) Teacher leaders need to be outliers in practice and schools need to be comfortable going outside the main body or group.
I really liked the last sentence of your opening paragraph, "We need schools that meet learners at their readiness level, accommodate personal learning preferences, and have content that is relevant to students’ interest in real-world ways." and I was struck later in the post when you discussed how your school is trying trends but not focused enough to be the model of any one vision. I find this to be the case in so many schools and often wonder if itʻs because there isnʻt a clear vision. In your case, you have a clear vision of the kind of school we need today. What does that look like in practice? How can you help your school focus and get better at individualization by addressing readiness and creating relevancy for each learner? If teacher leaders are outliers, how do they get followers on board? These are just rhetorical questions to push your thinking.
ReplyDeleteGreat thought provoking questions, thanks. I am excited that what I've read in "The Art of Possibility" actually helped me consider vision thinking in a different way. I hope to incorporate it into my Book work, but essentially, for everyday practice and in my school, I need to be part of shifting the conversation from each party protecting their individual needs to manifesting cohesive passion for what we do via reframing of perspectives.
DeleteOn Saturday, when we first met face-to-face, I felt like you already had many of the answers to the big questions about education because of your work at Assets. I feel like what you are doing there already puts you ahead of most teachers because of the way you teach to your differentiated learners. Even though at Assets, you are “not yet masters”, you are definitely working in the right direction. In our readings and in the videos we have been watching this week, I keep hearing that we need to individualize instruction. I am sold and I want to make that happen for my students but my biggest question is HOW can this be done? Following the advice of Sugata Mitra during his Ted Talk, Build a School in the Cloud, I googled “how to individualize instruction” and found numerous resources. Maybe you really can teach yourself to do anything in this Information Age. If young children in the most remote parts of India using a computer though a “hole in the wall” can teach themselves about transcription and translation of the DNA molecule, then why shouldn’t I be able to teach myself how to individualize instruction. I am optimistic.
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