By Allison Zmuda
How can we paint a picture for the stakeholders of our school community of what schooling must do for the students we serve? How do we put it into action?
As technology continues to push into our schools and classrooms, our children are becoming more empowered to take action using their growing networks, skill sets, and ideas. Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, envisions that the abundance of technology in the hands of the learner will disrupt traditional pedagogy. “The virtual will create a very different type of disruption. We should not aim to replace the physical classroom. Instead we have an opportunity to blend the virtual with the physical and reimagine education entirely.”
Canadian researcher Stephen Downes calls for a seismic shift from “an education is something that is provided for us” to “the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.” Will Richardson echoes this sentiment and calls for a narrative that focuses on training students to be accomplished learners. “It’s a kind of schooling that prepares students for the world they will live in, not the one in which most of us grew up. In this new narrative, learning ceases to focus on consuming information or knowledge that is no longer scarce. Instead, it’s about asking questions, working with others to find the answers, doing real work for real audiences, and adding to, not simply taking from, the storehouse of knowledge that the Web is becoming. It’s developing the kinds of habits and dispositions that deep, lifelong learners need to succeed in a world rife with information and connections.”
The learner now has truly become the heart of the classroom, three key principles underlie this new narrative: personalization, feedback, and sharing.
Personalization. To personalize learning for every child, teachers shift from their role of instructor to one of collaborators with students. From Growing Success, “How students feel about themselves as learners and whether they enjoy learning and strive for excellence are closely related to their teachers’ professional skills both in differentiating instruction and assessment and in helping students understand how they can improve.” Every student is encouraged to pursue challenges, problems, questions, and tasks that are driven by a larger concept, wonder, or hope. To handle the structural messiness of this, some staff are playing with “genius hour” where students are in charge of their own learning. Other staff are co-creating projects or problems with the students and then conferencing either one on one or with the whole class as to what standards it is measuring. Another possible approach would be for teachers to create the general parameters of the task and then the task is personalized by students for content, communication product (i.e. illustration, model, newspaper article), process (i.e. individual or collaborative, library research, interviews, investigation).
Feedback. Teachers guide less and observe more. Whether it is a traditional, flipped or blended classroom environment, teachers provide specific, descriptive feedback to students to inform students of their progress as well as recalibrate instruction based on what the students need. Outside of school, students are accustomed to receiving immediate feedback through gaming and other forms of social media. Judy Willis, a neurologist and educator, describes the power of video games as a model for instruction. “Games insert players at their achievable challenge level and reward player effort and practice with acknowledgement of incremental goal progress, not just final product…When the brain receives that feedback that this progress has been made, it reinforces the networks used to succeed.” Incremental progress can also be done in a classroom setting as well by describing the learning targets and having students and teachers examine work together to determine immediate next steps.
Sharing. Students want to make a difference in the world right now rather than waiting around for someday when they are older. Their ideas, innovations, and service can be harnessed through community projects that demonstrate growth in conceptual understanding, skill development, and ability to improve upon their work based on results. When University of Calgary researchers Sharon Friesen and David Jardine investigated what 21st century learners want, some of the highlights from the study were:
“We want to do work that makes a difference to us and to our world.
We want to learn with the media of our times.
We want to do work that is relevant, meaningful, and authentic.
We want to be engaged intellectually.”
If we leverage technological tools in service to clarity of purpose and authenticity of task, students are more likely to invest in the work because it means something. Imagine if young students determined how much food a local animal shelter needed for one month. Then, students might determine an action plan of how to raise number of dollars, cans, or bags to supply the shelter. They can estimate how long it might take to fundraise, set targets, develop media to solicit contributions. Imagine the pride of students when they see gratitude as they share the results of their efforts. Not only is this a rich multi-disciplinary, problem-solving, collaborative, communicative task but it also demonstrates the power of groups of individuals to change their environment.
Practical Steps in Vision and Action
Define what you are aiming for.
Tony Wagner offers seven highly valued skills based on conversations with employers from around the globe. Below are each skill and an illustrative quotation. (This set of skills is one of many similar sets that can be used to start a local conversation. See Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Michael Fullan’s agenda for Ontario.
1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
“The idea that a company’s senior leaders have all the answers and can solve problems by themselves has gone completely by the wayside…The person who’s close to the work has to have strong analytic skills. You have to be rigorous: test your assumptions, don’t take things at face value, don’t go in with preconceived ideas that you’re trying to prove.” - Ellen Kumata, consultant to Fortune 200 companies
2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence
“The biggest problem we have in the company as a whole is finding people capable of exerting leadership across the board…Our mantra is that you lead by influence, rather than authority.” – Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Cisco
3. Agility and Adaptability
“I’ve been here four years, and we’ve done fundamental reorganization every year because of changes in the business…I can guarantee the job I hire someone to do will change or may not exist in the future, so this is why adaptability and learning skills are more important than technical skills.” - Clay Parker, President of Chemical Management Division of BOC Edwards
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurship
“For our production and crafts staff, the hourly workers, we need self-directed people…who can find creative solutions to some very tough, challenging problems.”- Mark Maddox, Human Resources Manager at Unilever Foods North America
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
“The biggest skill people are missing is the ability to communicate: both written and oral presentations. It’s a huge problem for us.” - Annmarie Neal, Vice President for Talent Management at Cisco Systems
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
“There is so much information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren’t prepared to process the information effectively, it almost freezes them in their steps.” - Mike Summers, Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell
7. Curiosity and Imagination
“Our old idea is that work is defined by employers and that employees have to do whatever the employer wants…but actually, you would like him to come up with an interpretation that you like-he’s adding something personal-a creative element.” -Michael Jung, Senior Consultant
The skills identified are powerful and the quotations helpful, but they need to make sense to local stakeholders. Clarity, simplicity, and multidisciplinary language help describe what it is that school is designed to develop the capacity of every student over time. This set of skills can be embedded in the PK-12 curriculum in conjunction with the larger discipline-specific concepts and skills to frame what we expect from our learners.
Tell your collective story. A lot.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to connect with others. Share the ideas by painting a picture of what can be using description as well as illustrative examples. For example, what does creativity look like in a 1st grade math classroom? How does it become more sophisticated in spite of the fact that students may become more focused on a right answer? What does collaboration look like both in and out of school? How are we encouraging it through our policies and our practices?
Incentivize staff innovation and sharing. In Growing Success, the policy states, “Teachers create environments in which all students feel valued and confident and have the courage to take risks and make mistakes.” The same must be true for our staff. While each district and school may have specific initiatives, consider the notion of the “genius hour” for staff — a place where individuals or a team of teachers pursue fascinating in service to at least one of the initiatives or something new altogether. With freedom comes responsibility as staff should share the goal(s) that drove the inquiry/project/topic, the learning path, as well as the outcomes and next steps.
Create a portfolio of accomplishments. While course grades and test scores are a useful tool to communicate with students and parents, create a repository for every student to house their accomplishments to travel with them throughout his or her schooling. These portfolios are truly owned by the learner and are encouraged to populate the portfolio with in-school and out-of-school tasks that demonstrate growth in service of identified skills. Students then can examine evidence in their portfolio to set goals and monitor progress, lead conferences with teachers and parents, or cull examples for interviews or college applications.
The more the story is shared, the more likely individuals and groups of folks put their thumbprints on it as they are making sense of the vision. They will pose questions, provide illustrative examples of their own, and wonder aloud about the possibilities. This active sense-making grows the power of the story as it becomes more reflective of the aspirations of the community in service to a new pedagogical narrative where students and staff co-create the learning experience together.
Works Cited
Downes, Stephen. A World to Change (18 October 2010). Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-downes/a-world-to-change_b_762738.html
Friesen, Sharon and David Jardine, 21st Century Learning and Learners http://education.alberta.ca/media/1087278/wncp%2021st%20cent%20learning%20(2).pdf
Khan, Salman. The Founder of Khan Academy on How to Blend the Virtual with the Physical (26 July 2013). Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=salman-khan-how-blend-virtual-with-physical
Richardson, Will. Why School? TED Conferences (2012).
Wagner, Tony. Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need–and What We Can Do About It (2010). New York: Basic Books.
Willis, Judy. A Neurologist Makes the Case for the Video Game Model as a Learning Tool (14 April 2011). http://www.edutopia.org/blog/video-games-learning-student-engagement-judy-willis
Allison Zmuda is an author and education consultant whose focus is creating dynamic learning environments for like-minded educators, parents, and kids. She has authored six books and her latest book, Breaking Free from Myths about Teaching and Learning, (ASCD, 2010) inspired the development of her new website Just Start! Kids and Schools. Allison serves as co-founder and curator of the site devoted to re-imagining what schooling looks like through the exchange of ideas and examples. Allison can be contacted via email: az@just-start.com.