December 2004 Newsletter

Volume 8 Issue 10  December 2004

Education in the 21st Century

Welcome to the dinner party of a lifetime!

Part 2

 Mark Treadwell

Occasionally in history events conspire together to bring about fundamental change across an entire social landscape.  We are presently witnessing one such event; the complete rebuilding of what we understand education to be.  The transition to the second education paradigm is changing education forever, and those countries which recognise this opportunity and have the social and political willpower to make the transition will dominate the knowledge economies of the 21st century.  The choice is quite stark: realise the opportunity, invest in it and reap the rewards or pretend that nothing is happening, that change is too difficult and become trapped in an education never-never land and watch as social, economic and knowledge potential withers and dies.  Countries must choose to make the transition and do so knowingly and with a sense of purpose and commitment.  Choosing to do nothing is a choice.

Chapter 3:  The Entree

For some time now we have been discussing the advent of the second education paradigm, brought about by the transition from a world where information and communication systems were rare, expensive but reliable to world where the information and communication landscape has dramatically altered and where both come in a wide range of formats/genre and both are now overwhelming in number, depth and quality (with an equivalent variability in all these aspects) and as well as being cheap, they require a new raft of skills in order to be used and managed effectively.  This transition has birthed the potential for many of our lifelong dreams about education to become realisable, both practically and economically.

The above paradigm shift has spawned a wide range of tangible educational transitions which were possible in the previous paradigm but unfortunately many were impractical, relying heavily on the teacher constantly re-inventing the wheel, individually creating rich content for their students to interrogate and work with.  Teachers were required to create this rich content as the library was unable to resource clever, rich, open, fertile, high order thinking questions which transcended the low-level thematic topics such as space, earthquakes, the undersea world, dinosaurs musicians/mathematicians/scientists of historical consequence, . . . .  which could be resourced from the local library as there were 29 books on these topics in almost every school library in the world. Clever, rich, open, fertile, higher order thinking questions which encourage an education endpoint of understanding rather than just knowing, requires rich resources that make use of numerous media formats, are available 24/7 and can be manipulated simply and easily in a rich web based teaching and learning environment.

However this transition is just one of many that accompanies the adoption of the second [modern] education paradigm.  Additional transitions are highlighted in the diagram below: Additional background on the adoption of the second [modern] education paradigm can be found at [http://www.teachers.work.co.nz/archive_Aug_2004.htm]

Diagram 3

Implementing the Changes: So how will these transitions be introduced into education when teachers are already frantically busy?  2007-2010 is a period of time that is quite frightening in its consequences. Not only will almost all schools have to implement a new curriculum but they will also have two train every staff member on how to use a completely new set of electronic tools in order for them to operate efficiently and effectively in this new paradigm.  Three of those tools are:

Student Management Systems: In order to record assessment data, manage absences, record health and social details, provide timetabling support and management, provide tools for graphing and interpretation of the assessed data, demonstrate "coverage" of curriculum and as well as possibly including a library cataloguing and borrowing system. . . . .  Schools will require a comprehensive software package to manage all these issues.

Assessment software: A software based solution will form at least part of the process of effectively assessing student understanding of prescribed competencies.  These programs are getting increasingly sophisticated and far more capable of making accurate assessments of not just explicit knowledge but also implicit applications of understanding.

Intranet, Extranet & Knowledge NET’s ©: Schools began with simple in-house intranets available only to those people within the school environment and these then evolved to becoming intranets that were available from outside the classroom environment and now we have web based intranet environments which can publish web pages/sites very easily using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing tools that are embedded in the web browser.  These then matured into web based environments which allowed groups of schools to work cooperatively together as an extranet.  The final incarnation on this continuum is the Knowledge NET© [http://www.knowledge-networks.co.nz].  The Knowledge NET©  is a resource rich personal intranet for every student and every staff member as well as an integrated Internet web site fed content directly from material placed online by the users. 

The Knowledge NET© also hosts the extranet which allows the cluster of (5-10) schools to share subjects in a remote learning management environment.  The Knowledge NET©  also has embedded within it its own education search engine and library, access to Digital Learning Objects and easy access to common tools, encyclopaedias and newspapers so that students have a complete research centre when using any internet enabled computer (access by userID and password).  The Knowledge NET© also contains an integrated electronic portfolio for the student and a professional development portfolio for each teacher. The Knowledge NET© e-portfolios contain online blogging, project planning and goal setting tools. The Knowledge NET© also contains discussion groups, chat, newsletters . . . .  A completely integrated environment but once again the use of a Knowledge NET© requires professional development.

Digital learning Objects

As well as the software tools described above there is another resource that is quietly being built around the world that will allow teachers to make use of resources built specifically for use in intranets/Knowledge NET© ’s. These web based resources are known as Digital learning Objects. Increasingly Digital Learning Objects are being created in a web format and stored on databases that are being made available to schools throughout the world.  At the extreme end of this continuum is the DLO’s being created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; entire courses!  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was one of the first of the major institutions to provide completely free online courses.  MIT has available on a web site [http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html] hundreds of broad- range online courses that are free to access for anyone, anywhere, anytime.  There are 600 courses available online and there are more to come.  The potential this offers "students" around the world is enormous.  In the United Kingdom the Open Knowledge Initiative, a collaboration amongst the leading universities, is putting online an "open source extensible architecture" that specifies how components and educational software environments communicate with each other. Other "object repository management systems" are being offered such as Fedora [http://www.fedora.info] which can be used to create interoperable web based digital libraries, institutional repositories and information management systems.

At the other end of the DLO continuum is a picture library [Free Foto http://www.freefoto.com] or a collection of science questions [NZCER Resource banks http://arb.nzcer.org.nz/nzcer3/nzcer.htm] or a unit of work on Shakespeare’s genre [Fathom http://www.fathom.com/course/21701729/index.html] or a collection of ICT training modules [Kidzonline http://www.kidzonline.com/TechTraining/]  . . . . the number of DLO’s available is enormous, already there are millions.

The idea of Digital Learning Objects is that you combine them together in a sequence to create a unit of work or lesson plan. The introduction may come from one DLO library, the animations from another, the questions from another, the background reading from yet another and the extension activities from another location again. This is where WYSIWYG based intranets/Knowledge NET’s © come into their own as they allow educators to “drag and drop” or “cut and paste” DLO objects from their original online location into these environments, edit them if necessary (if allowed under the “conditions of use”) and then publish them on the internet for students to access without any knowledge of HTML coding whatsoever. Students can also place their work online using the same approach. These totally web based environments are quickly replacing “office software” as the standard process for publishing. Compiling content is now very straightforward process allowing teachers to spend more time on the process of the conceptual scaffolding that underpins the unit of work.

Each collection of DLO’s comes with its own “rights of use” which describes how educators may use these objects. Some collections allow teachers to use the objects within that collection in any way they wish, editing them and manipulating them as they desire. Other collections have specific copyright conditions associated with their use. Most DLO repositories have the “conditions of use” link at the bottom of their web page. Copyright is a major issue and with the advent of WYSIWYG editors and Knowledge NET’s © as these tools allow teachers to simply cut and paste web based objects into these environments.

 It would be reasonable to assume that the prolific supply of online units of work, DLO’s (Digital Learning Objects) and online resources in general will initiate the metamorphosis of the teachers focus from information/unit creation to the development of clever questioning strategies that encourages students to interrogate the supplied resources in such a way that they are able to build conceptual frameworks of understanding. The subsequent learning experiences will hopefully lead to an understanding of the knowledge, as well as ensuring its retention.

Some of the most interesting work in creating learning objects is happening at the K-12 level.  The initiative by the Australian and New Zealand governments under the auspices of the Learning Federation [http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au] is backed by a $60 million budget to develop online interactive curriculum content specifically for Australian and New Zealand schools.  To quote the web site the aim here is to ensure that "The systems will also facilitate the breakdown of content into discrete 'objects' and the reassembly and repurposing of these to suit the particular needs of teachers and students." 

The concept of learning objects involves the creation of discrete items that are described by metadata (an image of a fire engine would include the metadata creation date, author's name, keywords, curriculum areas that this might be associated with). There is obviously quite a range of descriptors that can be applied to each learning object, and so several standards have been developed, the one most institutions seem to be using being referred to as "Dublin Core" [http://www.dublincore.org/]. This project and many more like it around the world are building up huge repositories of web based learning objects that will be made available to teachers to create extensible learning opportunities. 

As we have mentioned previously, the 21^st century will be dominated by those who have an understanding as well as knowledge of, ideas and concepts. Having taught “knowing” for so long, considerable perseverance will be required to make the transition to teaching for understanding.

The Necessity for Lifelong Learning: The approach described above cannot be successfully established without the students learning similar teaching and learning techniques. There are several reasons for this line of thinking:

1. If students acquire the capability for asking clever and well constructed questions then they will be able to interrogate information creatively and build understanding on their own when and where the process is required; this is truly “lifelong learning”. These skills will flow through into their work and social lives, resulting in them and their work associates, friends and family acquiring a far better understanding of changes within all spheres of their world whether it be their work place, politics, new technologies, building relationships . . .

2. In order to construct meaning, students need to think about their own thinking in an extrinsic manner, (metacognition), using a form of self-directed questioning that will interrogate their own understanding. By encouraging this we can help them to better understand, refine and present concepts as well as “create” new understandings.

Effective questioning strategies need to be strategically thought through so they build on present knowledge and understanding and allow the extension of present understanding. What this means is that asking questions that assume some already developed conceptual understanding, may well limit the possible learning response if that presumed preliminary conceptual understanding is not established and processed sufficiently to be applied in a (possibly) different context.  The challenge to teachers then is to begin to build concept scaffolding plans that facilitate the “incremental development of increasingly sophisticated conceptual frameworks”. [http://www.teachers.work.co.nz/archive_Sept_2004.htm#Scaffolding].  

The use of DLO’s allows teachers to focus on scaffolding the

These three software tools will need to be interoperable and data stored on any one of these needs to be available to any other program and this will require some degree of centralised direction/management.  If you couple the professional development that is required to effectively use these three software tools with the need for professional development that will be required for teachers to adopt not just a new curriculum but a whole new raft of teaching strategies alongside the 21st century understanding of how students learn most effectively, you begin to realise the scale of professional development that is going to be required of all teachers.

Professional Development: The Professional Development requirement of teachers in order to make this transition to the second paradigm is considerable (actually it is huge; on a scale of 1-10 this is a 10+!) and will require whole new infrastructures to be built in order for teachers to upskill efficiently and effectively and in a manner that is both realistic for the teacher and scalable economically.

It is important for teachers to have an overarching philosophical framework for teaching and learning as described above that is in keeping with the shift to the second education paradigm before we start the micro-upskilling of teachers in the transitions outlined in the diagram above (there are many other transitions not included in diagram 3). There has been a tendency in the past to develop teacher capability in a variety of the micro-pedagogical areas without an overarching philosophical framework and because of this approach it becomes almost inevitable that we end up with teachers receiving philosophically quite contradictory (at worst) and incompatible (at best), teaching and learning instruction during the process of their upskilling.

There has been a recent global trend towards schools and individual teachers managing their own professional development program and while this sounds attractive, teachers may/do tend to choose professional development in areas they are already competent in rather than those areas that require remediation. At the same time it is important to note that teachers may be blissfully unaware of their own needs while at same time equating their wants (in terms of professional development) with their needs.

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At this point I would like to insert a key point in regards the professional development of teachers: Teachers require upskilling in effective teaching and learning strategies but as a general rule professional development has been historically focused on assisting schools in delivering and assessing the delivery, of the schools “program”. The second education paradigm has its end point a focus on understanding rather than knowing, hence the focus of any professional development should be on improving our understanding of:

1. Learning: How do students learn, what is their cognitive capacity for learning and where are they in their learning cognitive development continuum, and which strategies best meet the capability of any given student at any given point in their learning continuum? We now know a lot more about the mind and how it manages new ideas, holds on to memories and builds conceptual frameworks, than we did previously (mostly through the fMRI scanning technology [http://www.cogneurosociety.org/content/links].  We have a huge distance to go before can say we understand what is happening in our minds and how we can best maximize that potential but we do know a lot more than we did in the 20th century. But much of what is taught to teacher graduates and also in professional development sessions for teachers in the 21^st century is still based on a 20^th century knowledge base.

2.  Teaching:  Which teaching strategies maximize what the individual student or cadre of students is capable of understanding and what information is required to be known in order for the strategies to be selected and put into practice? The key elements here are that 1. Teachers need to be aware of the wide range of teaching strategies that are available to them. 2. Students have available to them rich information and communication resources and 3. Teachers are aware of effective assessment (not testing) strategies and have them in place, which then informs them quite clearly about what the student understands and at what point(s) in the learning process/continuum are in need of remediation.

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Too often "teaching and learning" has come to mean a singular entity rather than two distinctly different but interlocking fields.  Teaching staff need considerable upskilling in both of these two areas and the two areas, although interrelated, need to have a degree of separation so that an appropriate balance of both is delivered through professional development processes.

The required professional development needs to focus on generic teaching and learning practices that require considerable upskilling, not the teachers’ knowledge and understanding of new content. In order to achieve this traditional professional development course attendance will simply not economically viable practical for all staff over such a wide number of upskilling areas or so a new model is required.  One such possible model is described below and the purpose for its presentation is to stimulate discussion on innovative solutions to the dilemma outlined above rather than present it as the solution.

To manage professional development on this scale it is suggested that each school or group of schools providing student population of 800 could be offered a two-year professional development staff secondment whose role it will be to develop teaching and learning capabilities of the staff of the school(s).  Their title would be "Professional Development Coordinator". This person does not have to have an understanding of each curriculum area but rather their strength will be in teaching and learning practices as this is the focus of the professional development required.

Each of the three software tools described above should have intuitive software interfaces and it will be the conceptual framework that requires explanation rather than a technical person presenting these solutions.  If it requires a technical person to make the presentation/professional development for these packages then you have chosen the wrong product!  This full-time professional development person would require two months of intensive professional development themselves and also require ongoing professional development for one day in five for the period of their two-year secondment.  Following this two-year period a new secondment is taken on for this role, expanding the knowledge base within each school or group of schools.

The professional development coordinator would also sit in on classes and provide suggestions and insights into how an individual staff member can improve their teaching practices as well as providing professional development sessions on effective teaching and learning in a one-to-many environment.  The qualities of the professional development coordinator would be considerable but above all this person needs to be passionate and be someone that the teaching fraternity will trust implicitly in a supportive peer-to-peer capacity. 

This one-to-one and one-to-many professional development process program would be augmented with online national professional development opportunities.  This would take the form of electronic professional development and would make use of the WYSIWYG interfaces and rich digital learning objects in order to ensure that the quality of instruction was at the highest level.  This would also assist in modelling the teaching and learning that would be expected of the teachers themselves.  Software packages such as Macromedia's product "Breeze" has huge application possibilities due to its capability for streaming simple video as well as presenting interactive multi-user workspaces and providing inbuilt "chat" communication tools.

This integrated online and face-to-face professional development program is an expensive option; but what would be more expensive would be to develop an entirely new curriculum and integrate all these software tools, requiring a whole new range of skill sets for teachers and then not provide appropriate professional development for the teachers to make maximum use of these resources and subsequently provide their students with a truly 21st century education.

Chapter 4:  The Main Course

That there needs to be a cohesive and well thought out central curriculum is without doubt but unfortunately there is a tendency for teachers to focus on the content of such documents rather than the conceptual ideals that underpins the document.  As a teaching fraternity we need to face up to a major obstacle here: to quote Jacqueline Grennon Brooks in a recent article entitled "to see beyond the lesson" Go to To See Beyond the Lesson for this article.

"Teaching is a complicated process and it is imperative that we stop trying to make it appear simple.  Many teachers readily acknowledge that for a variety of reasons they engaged in little meaning making with their students.  Many acknowledge that they engage in little learning for meaning when they were students.  Consequently, few teachers have actually had the experience as students of discerning patterns among ideas, generating unifying principles, or identifying similarities and differences among events. Few teachers are able to imagine how such classrooms could operate.  "This is really great," they say, "and I‘d love to teach this way, but we have to cover the curriculum."

Historically the focus of most curriculum documents has been the content they contain.  In teaching parlance it is not "location, location, location!"  but rather it is the "content, content, content" that really matters and the primary reason for this is that this was how teachers were taught themselves.  In social service programs a lot of effort goes on to "breaking the cycle of violence".  The understanding here is that the very people who are the victims of violence have a tendency to becoming people who victimise others violently.  The same applies to teaching.  We tend to teach in the manner in which we were taught, even though we know that our learning experiences were possibly very poor ones.  This is a hard cycle to break. This change in teacher culture is something we urgently need to get our heads around, otherwise any new curriculum that is instigated and which does not contain a very prescribed curriculum (in order to meet the needs of the 21^st Century learner by definition the curriculum will not focus on delivering content), will have the previous curriculum content simply assumed and inserted where teachers think appropriate.

The other stakeholder that requires a severe marketing make-over in this regard is the parents/caregivers.  Many schools which have moved into areas such as teaching thinking, developing learning attitudes, and lifelong thinking skills have been caned by parents/caregivers as having no regard for "standards" and there have been a multitude of Chicken Little's racing around proclaiming that the sky is falling (standards are falling) because Johnny does not known the capital of Venezuela and Mary cannot divide two fractions as a piece of mental arithmetic.  The notion that this bit of information can be discovered by anyone who can spell the word "Google" (should they need to know) or that dividing two fractions is a completely useless process, (both practically, cognitively or as part of a developmental process), is a real stretch for the parent/caregiver community, along with most politicians.  This of course comes from the same group of people who readily admit that their education experiences were woefully inadequate and the many were bored rigid through the whole process.

An important note should be made here that this is not a reductionist policy where the only things that are taught are things that have life-skill applications.  There is joy in coming to a point where the learner understands a new concept, idea or philosophy and experiences the "a-haaa” moment and even if that concept, idea or philosophy has no practical application whatsoever, it can be validated through the fact the process and underlying euphoria of discovering a new concept has been experienced.  The motivation for pure research is not eh glory or and financial benefits but rather it is the a-haaa moment which is a very pleasurable one. So as usual is all about balance in the delivery of and deciding what competencies students require to be effective 21st century citizens.

Balanced against this is the realisation that it is simply not possible or desirable to deliver the historical syllabus that so many parents/caregivers expect of their local school.  This is not possible or desirable for three fundamental reasons:

1.  Given that our end point has now migrated from knowledge to understanding and that teachers will need to set clever, higher order, open, rich, fertile questions along with the questioning strategies that assist in the development of fundamental knowledge, the idea of doing "space" in three weeks as a science unit simply evaporates.  If the 21st century teacher sets thematic topics for students such as space, dinosaurs, weather, travel, heroes, volcanoes, mathematicians from history, village life, earthquakes, the undersea world . . . There is a greater than even chance that the student will simply pay $2.99 and download the necessary project from School Sux [www.schoolsux.com] or some similar easily accessed database of online school projects.

2.  In order to teach a unit of work with the opening question

”compare and contrast the development of life on earth with that on Mars by identifying three similarities and three differences between the features of the planets.  Using one of these differences use it to develop a hypothesis as to why you think life on earth has developed so prolifically while life on Mars seems nonexistent".

The teacher needs to provide rich resources in order that the student can carry out significant investigation and research and cannot simply downloaded or copy and paste the answer or project from a single source. The upshot of this is that the amount of work perceived to have been "covered" will be significantly less than that apparently learnt through doing a study on "the solar system ". Asking clever, rich, fertile or open questions means a much more focused approach to content and teaching will involve the perception of delivering less but rather than surface knowledge what is taught will have more depth and a focus on understanding.

3. There are increasing demands on schools to deliver a wide range of new skill sets (such as information and communication technology skills, a wider range of literacy capability, project/time management, “keeping ourselves safe”,  . . .), an increasing amount of time carrying out what can be best described as "social welfare" work (working more closely with the parent/caregiver, ensuring appropriate care at home, sporting/cultural commitments), additional time teaching "critical thinking skills", more thorough assessment of students. . . . . .  And this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

How is it even remotely possible to deliver all of these new expectations, teach more creatively using a broad range of questioning strategies and rich resources, and still deliver the same amount of baseline content?  It is simply impossible!

But we must communicate these changes to the communities that we service and not just assume they are aware of these things through some form of osmotic process.  Marketing to our communities the changes embedded in the emerging new paradigm of what “school” is, is absolutely critical, otherwise the teaching fraternity will face a barrage of criticism from thousands of “Chicken Little's”.

Given the purpose of education outlined earlier what sort of curriculum would meet this purpose and the needs of 21st century learners?  The 1998 DeSeCo report released by the OECD (and unfortunately no longer available online) investigated 12 countries and their education systems in an attempt to identify and possibly define essential or core competencies that were generic for all citizens.  This report initiated a series of follow-on reports by various agencies, in particular the research work of the Programme for International Student Assessment PISA study entitled "Learning for Tomorrow's World” [http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/55/0,2340,en_32252351_32236173_33917303_1_1_1_1,00.html]  with as well as Information Network on Education in Europe (Eurydice) paper entitled "Key Competencies: A Developing Concept in General Compulsory Education" [http://www.eurydice.org/Documents/survey5/en/FrameSet.htm] (the introduction of this report pp11-25 is particularly valuable).  These reports then lead to a draft set of defined competencies that could more suitably underpin at least part of the purpose of education.  Returning to the metaphor of the dinner party it is important to remember that a dinner party is not just about gaining sustenance but alongside this it is a social occasion and one which would hopefully encourage greater understanding via wide range of discourse and presentation(s) and through modelling and teaching encourage acceptable social behaviours and responsibilities common to responsible citizens and effective communities. 

Two antipodean sets of competencies that are in the discussion phase have been released by Australian and New Zealand governments.  The Victorian Department of Education (Vocational Education & Training) highlights seven generic competencies [http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/voced/ented/keycomp/what.htm] that people would require for effective participation in the workforce and they have listed these as:

·         Using Information: the capacity to locate information, sift and sort information in order to select what is required and present it in a useful way, and evaluate both information itself and the methods used to obtain it.

·         Communicating Ideas: the capacity to communicate effectively with others using a range of spoken, written, graphic and of other non-verbal means of expression.

·         Planning & Organising: the capacity to plan and organise one's own work activities, including making good use of time and resources, sorting and priorities and monitoring one's own performance.

·         Working in Teams: the capacity to interact effectively with other people both on a 121 basis and in groups, including understanding and responding to the needs of clients and working effectively as a member of the team to achieve a shared goal. 

·         Using Mathematics: the capacity to use mathematical ideas, such as number and space, and techniques, such as estimation and approximation, for practical purposes.

·         Solving Problems: the capacity to apply problem solving strategies in purposeful ways, both in situations where the problem and the design solution are clearly evident and in situations requiring critical thinking and a creative approach to achieve an outcome.

·         Using Technology: the capacity to apply technology, combining the physical and sensory skills needed to operate equipment with the understanding of scientific and technological principles needed to explore and adapt systems.

A proposed framework of essential competencies being investigated for the New Zealand compulsory education (year 0-13/k-12) sector by the Ministry of Education there [http://www.tki.org/r/nzcurriculum/docs/CompetenciesDiscussionPaper.doc] includes the following five essential competencies groups coupled with three attitudinal competencies.

·         Thinking: critically, creatively and logically

·         Relating to others

·         Belonging, participating and contributing

·         Managing self

·         Making Meaning: Multi-literacies and using language, movement, symbols and technologies

Attitudinal competencies:

·         Motivation: including willingness and "can-do" attitude

·         Confidence: including a view of the self as a competent learner

·         Curiosity or inquiry: including open-mindedness

There will undoubtedly be a multitude of permutations drawn from a wide range of competencies presented and debated by governments over the next 10 years.  What we can be assured of is that literacy and numeracy will still feature within any set of competencies, however our concept of literacy will have to expand considerably to include a wide number of literacies [http://www.i-learnt.com/Information_New_Literacies.html] in order to be a lifelong learner.  Our concept of numeracy capability will also need considerable revision and reflection.

Many substantive issues flow directly from the advent of the second paradigm (these have been documented earlier in this article), and the above competencies will become interwoven with the changes in teaching and learning practices that flow from the advent of the second paradigm.

Go here for Section 3 of this presentation

Comments and suggestions to

Mark Treadwell

Teachers@work.co.nz

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