Template -- Teachers @ Work

The “perfect storm” that formed in 1991 off the east coast of the US did not arrive fully formed as a single unit but rather it was built over a week, from three weather systems.

The first element (energy source), was a small low pressure system that formed over the Great Lakes, on the Canadian/US border which then tracked west to east, from Chicago to Maine, and on past Nova Scotia.

Along the way this storm collided with the second energy source: a very cold front moving down from Canada. The two systems combined into a significant storm in the North Atlantic, off Nova Scotia's coast. But there was more to come.

The third energy source that would contribute to the "perfect" storm was a hurricane; Grace, off the cost of Florida but inexorably sucking the other two storm systems south. Horrified meteorologists watched on, unable to stop the inevitable, while most people went about their lives not realizing what was about to take place. These three systems merged to form a storm that covered 10 000’s of square kilometers with waves over 30m high and winds of over 100km/hour. To put this into perspective "The combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union don't contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day."[1]

Ten years later in 2001 high speed internet became available using ADSL and wireless technology and it caused a storm in education circles. Meanwhile, brewing within schools was a deepening depression as teachers worked under the weight of an overloaded curriculum combined with new demands to teach thinking skills, critical literacy, ICT, ethics and values, visual literacy, teamwork, as well as mediating social issues and providing after school coaching, mentoring and “supervision”. Off to the education south the internet was becoming a huge swirling hurricane of rich, powerful, multimedia information and its impact was beginning to be felt with students now able to cut and paste information with ease, creating assignments and answering traditional educational challenges in minutes with little or no understanding required.

A few researchers and educationalists watched on in horror as they realised that these three storms were inexorably moving towards each other and were about to create the “perfect [education] storm”. Predictions about the impact of this "perfect [education] storm" began to circulate and educationalists sat back and watched the calm before the storm through 2001-2002. In late 2002 waves started to grow and the wind started to increase; timbers creaked and the inevitable outcome was cast as these three [education] storms began to merge together.

Storms, by their very nature are change agents, but on a huge scale. The "perfect [education] storm" is still forming and will wreak havoc unless we prepare for it and use the huge amounts of energy that it will create, constructively. It is imperative that educators understand these three storms (high speed data services, the overcrowded curriculum and the information rich/multimedia internet environment), and the effect of them merging. If we anticipate and plan for the storm’s arrival, the energy from the storm can be harnessed to create the second education paradigm in the modern age. Those countries that do this will dominate the 21^st century, providing “Knowledge Workers” with the skills and tools to be innovative and ride the extreme “knowledge waves” that the perfect [education] storm will build through the years ahead.

The arrival of the second education paradigm is going to happen; it is up to us to prepare our schools for it and learn how to surf the waves and harness the energy it will create. This will become an educational, social and economic renaissance period for those countries that teach their citizens these skills and provide them to their students. The arrival of the second paradigm will be the most exciting time ever in educational history and we can look forward to its arrival; but only if we are prepared.

If we fail to learn to work with the storm, we will drown amongst public anger, recriminations and accusations. It is actually a very simple choice, the implications of which are far-reaching and profound. This month we are focusing on some of the issues that are brewing within the storm that are causing, and have caused substantial social change, building waves that are about to break over society and in particular school systems globally, dramatically changing much of the social infrastructure that schools have based their teaching and learning on.

The emergence of the capacity to deliver the second education paradigm presents educators with a unique and exciting set of opportunities (as there is whenever there is change). In previous newsletters we have highlighted the rationale and technological issues associated with the delivery of the second paradigm but what is being widely debated now is its effect on the traditional curriculum.

There have been two recent and significant studies on "the skills for the 21st century" that have looked at the impact of changes in society and how schools could and should respond:

Using these reports, feedback from teachers and additional reports noted throughout this document and previous newsletters we have attempted to develop a framework for "The Global Curriculum". It should be noted here that the focus in this paper is not on the structures and processes by which this will be delivered (these will be dealt with later) but rather on what will be delivered.

The temptation to try and transform traditional "subject areas" from the traditional list alone will be considerable, but also unhelpful. This paper is a work in progress and we would appreciate any comments about what skill sets or particular knowledge bases that you feel are crucial to the 21st century learner but have not been included below. Feedback on this can be sent to curriculum@work.co.nz We will attempt to acknowledge all submissions.

Before we start looking into what content should be in any curriculum we need to look at how much young people's lives (and consequently all of our lives), have changed in the past 40 years. The table below deals with some of the major themes of change in the past 40 years and provides still more impetus for adopting a new approach to education. The decile dependency column measures the effect to which these changes are related to income. The rating ranges from zero to ten with zero meaning there is minimal relationship between income and the change that is being described and ten meaning that there is a high correlation between the transition and income.

Theme	1964	2004	Decile dependency rating
Information access	The information landscape was relatively barren and information was relatively expensive, mostly being housed in the libraries, radio and television and newspapers/magazines.	Information landscape was a vast, based on multimedia and required numerous new technologies in order to interact successfully with it.	3
Information reliability	Non-politically sensitive information was mostly reliable. Political systems carried out most censorship and interpretation of incoming information.	Information increasingly variable in reliability. The ease of authorship on the one hand has decreased the likelihood of focused political interference but has increased the amount of variability in interpretation.	2
Communication	Primarily communication for our young people was person-to-person and oral. There was minimal written communication at the personal level.	Communication, while still being primarily oral, is increasingly text orientated with increasing use of e-mail and text messaging.	5
Decision-making	Few decisions needed to be made by young people and where these decisions were needed, there were strict cultural guidelines to assist in the decision-making process.	Young people are now having to make independent, decisions on a wide range of issues including leisure, money, fashion, peer structures, employment, sexual attitudes/activity, personal status etc. . . with most of their guidelines coming from their peers and the artificial "entertainment world".	3
Family structure	Predominantly two parents in a (possibly superficially) stable relationship. One parent, usually the mother, at home for a significant part of the child's early development (up to 12 years of age).	Depending on the community there will be up to a 50% possibility that one or either of the two caregivers will either not be present or will not be their biological parent. Depending on the community there will be up to a 60% chance that both parents will work	3
Travel	Most children did not travel much at all and if they did so it was inevitably in the process of accompanying their parents due to changes in their occupation/job.	Many, but certainly not all children now travel considerably. Children from higher decile (more affluent) homes will probably have travelled several times by plane to an overseas destination by the time they are 14 years old. Students from lower decile homes will still travel considerably more than their peers of 40 years ago. By way of this the children of today are potentially much more aware of their geographical and social world.	8

It has already been noted that we deliver significant content within school systems that is of little relevance to the real needs of young people but at the opposite end of the spectrum there are many things we don't deliver or instruct our young people in, where the need is considerable. For example we do not provide much instruction on being entrepreneurial and innovative when the workplace is crying out for such skills. We do not to spend much time teaching our young people to think and become autonomous lifelong learners. We do not spend a lot of time teaching our young people to be able to effectively communicate orally, in order that they can be successful within relationships, their workplace (almost 80 percent of most job opportunities lay within the service sector) and the "play place".

It has already been widely acknowledged that an improved balance is needed, between the amount of content that is delivered and the amount of process/skills that students require as we change from a “Just In Case” focus in education to a “Just In Time” focus. It is inevitable that the amount of historical content that will be delivered by teachers is going to reduce significantly, however the struggle now is to decide just what skills, processes and contexts that our students require. In recent presentations we have been providing teachers with the following scenario and asking them for their comments:

"An alien lands on the earth and surreptitiously observes the day-to-day lives of adults in numerous situations. At the end of several weeks of observations the alien speaks to a selected human and, under interrogation the human tells the alien that there is an institution called school where younger humans are provided with 13 years of training and development in order to educate them about how to be a successful adult human. The alien is fascinated by the idea and starts to ask the human what a school looks like, how it operates, how it is funded, how the information the younger humans require is passed over to them and what they are taught; unfortunately, t before the human can respond to these questions the alien is transported back to its mother ship.

The Alien commander asks the alien all about Planet Earth and what he has observed. After hearing lengthy reports about human behaviour and daily activities he then asks “How do these humans train the younger human to be successful older humans? The alien responds that they have schools that do this training. “What is a school, how does it function and what does it do?” asks the alien commander. Not having seen a school but not wanting to be humiliated in front of his commander, the alien makes up his response based on knowing what the skills and knowledge required by humans is. If you were the alien and know nothing of what schools were, and you had never seen or heard of what they did or how they function how would you respond to the alien commander?"

One of the fundamental mistakes that is often made in trying to take any particular system and bring it in line with what is actually required, is to begin with what is there already and try and work forward. It is, from a strategic planning point of view, much more empowering to begin with the vision and work backwards in order to form a strategic path to the future.

In our summary of how teachers have responded to the alien scenario we have developed a “global curriculum”. Although it is in its early stages of discussion and review and is certainly not complete we feel that it would be useful to put it forward as a discussion document. We welcome your comments and suggestions. teachers@work.co.nz

The global curriculum comprises nine main concept focused study areas (as per the alien!):

The flowchart below highlights the main themes contained in each of the study areas.

As far as developing a global curriculum, this is about as specific as we would like to get at this point. Achievement objectives would have to be set within each of these areas and contexts defined - these would be very much dependent on the country within which this curriculum was taught.

There is a temptation to review the topics in the boxes to make sure that every "subject" is covered. This is a very natural and understandable response but it is at odds with the concept of building a framework related to the workplace, social place and the relationship place, and empowering students to be lifelong learners. The argument that I am sure will arise is that "is education about preparing the person for life or about preparing the mind (for life)". The framework above should contain both and the contexts that are chosen and the achievement objectives that are set will delineate this balance.

We would be very interested in teachers comments on the above global curriculum. In particular, we are interested in areas (general/generic not specific) that you feel we may not have covered and also the concept of the global curriculum, noting that culture and difference will be played out through contexts and learning objectives.

Instant-on Computing?
Computers are enormously more capable than they were a decade or so ago, and yet you still find yourself drumming your fingers and looking at the ceiling while the machine laboriously boots itself up. Help is on the way: magnetic random-access memory, or MRAM, is moving into production—opening the way to an instant-on PC. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/innovation20304.asp?trk=nl

I have often used PowerPoint in presentations by projecting the image up onto a whiteboard so that I can write over the top of the slides as I work and explain particular points. At times it is necessary to turn the projector of as I need the whiteboard to be completely white so that I can start a new topic, brainstorm. . . . . Just recently in a presentation on “Smart” Whiteboards, the presenter (Rob Love) made the point that when using PowerPoint you can simply toggle between a blank screen and your presentation by pressing the letters "b" (blackboard) and "w" (whiteboard). This only works in PowerPoint but it is a simple and very effective tool for the presenter toolbox.