National Standards are Over? What Are We Going to Do Now?

It scares the hell out of me that educators are so entrenched in assessment-driven curricula that they are panicking about what to do in class now that National Standards are abolished.

• Step 1. Do some reading around future-focused learning and new pedagogies for deep learning.  Go on, google it!
• Step 2. Start by getting your learners to talk about what is important in the world.
• Step 3.  Let them think about ways they can have a part to play. 
• Step 4. Teach them ways of working on being communicative, collaborative, connected, creative, critically thinking, and expressing their character or culture
• Step 5.  Build on their individual skills and talents.

You won't stop wondering why you ever thought National Standards were so great.

The Age of the Textbook is Over - Own It!

In talking to a friend recently, I discovered that her teenager, who has just started college, and is still small, as boys often are at that tender age of 13, has a backpack full of textbooks to carry every day, along with a laptop as well.    This just about makes my blood boil.  What on earth are teachers doing, still expecting kids to carry textbooks? And exercise books?  This is the age of the digital school, isn't it?

If your school has moved to a digital environment (and there is no reason why it should not have in this eighteenth year of the 21st century), then you need to ditch the textbooks and the countless exercise books.  There is absolutely no need for huge stationery lists anymore.  You need to protest and make sure the school makes changes so that stationery lists are minimal and the only book that the learners carry is the occasional one that they might borrow from the classroom or the library for a bit of extra reading or study (yes, chuck out the homework, too).

Why on earth are schools spending their budgets on textbooks?  Please, can someone explain?

My five minutes of fame slipped by.

I was invited to appear on TVOne's Breakfast programme on Friday 16th February to answer a burning question from a viewer who wanted to know if Modern Learning Environments (MLEs) were better for children. 

Unfortunately, because I was due to be working at a school in Masterton, the cameraman could not get to me, and the organisers decided to "go down a different direction" which meant that they interviewed Leon Benade from AUT instead.  Leon is a senior lecturer in education, researching MLE's and was interesting to listen to.

I wanted to add in my ten cents worth, as you do, and thought I should post another blog about it.  I have blogged about MLEs before in this 2013 post and this (April, 2015) and this (also April, 2015) and this (November, 2015) and this ( January, 2016), but thought it might be useful to revisit since the discussion is freshly at the forefront, and I don't want to think that my potential 5 minutes of fame has fizzled into nothing.

Leon identified modern learning environments as large open spaces, with multiple use zones, modern brightly coloured mobile, furniture for up to 120 learners and 4 teachers.  I would like to add that a modern learning environment can also happen in a single cell classroom with one teacher, and that it is more about the pedagogical approach than the space.  (Leon alludes to this later in saying that the people in the space make the difference.)

The advantages of having more than one teacher in the space were covered by Leon - giving flexibility to the teachers, utilising different areas of expertise, and load sharing.  Enabling the conditions for personalised learning can also happen in a one cell classroom, with the support of digital technologies. 

Jack Tame interviewing said that parents are scared, and Leon advised them to acknowledge and embrace the changes because we can't go on teaching the same way.  Why not, I hear you ask?  Because we were preparing our learners for a different industrial model of work and now we are preparing them for an uncertain future but one in which individual strengths coupled with ability to integrate into team approaches, collaboration and knowledge building and sharing, and innovation will be valued, rather than compliance and standardisation (hurrah for the end of standardised testing in New Zealand!).

Jack said (and Leon confirmed) that the learners much prefer this way of working.  When the viewer was asking if it were better for children, she was not clear by which measure you could tell if it was "better" for children.  If you were looking just at the results of standardised tests, then you might see some differences (I don't believe there is substantial research about this out there and do hope that no one feels the need to do this).  If, however, you are talking about the well-being of learners, their ability to grow their own strengths and expertise and interests, and their preparedness for an uncertain future, then I think you will find that MLEs (or ILEs) will win, hands down.

Harking back to the people in the spaces, the teachers need to be well prepared and have had time for professional learning.   It is not a simple switch from single cell to MLEs.  Oh yes, the furniture and environment can be changed easily, but it is the practices of the teachers and learners that have to change hugely.  The MLE's must be supported by the use of digital fluency (teachers and learners knowing how to use a variety of tools to support and innovate their learning) and they will also be identified by the themes of future oriented teaching and learning espoused in Bolstad, Gilbert et al's 2012 work. 

And if you say you have a child who only likes working in a quiet space with no distractions, I do understand that, and there will be some quiet spaces in a MLE , but it is important that your child works at developing other ways of working so that they become flexible in approach, and able to adapt to very different working lives.

So there you have it: - what was my five minutes of fame, reworked into a blog post. 

A typical classroom in a Japanese junior high school (Wikipedia)