The Campaign For Real 21st Century Education

So what’s the problem? You can always buy the skills you need on Amazon…

Now one could be forgiven for thinking that schools across the country are busy putting away their toys and girding themselves up for a major onslaught of facts to throw at their poor unsuspecting students who, at least up to now, had found their education to have been of at least some interest and relevance. And while some schools are probably doing just that, there’s a growing underground resistance movement of teachers who are preparing themselves, or rather their students, for what are secretly known as ‘21st Century Skills‘ which are to be delivered using ‘21st Century Technology‘ through a mysterious process known as ‘21st Century Learning‘. And when Herr Gove finally surrenders and realises that he can’t win the war without any troops behind him, there’s a strong possibility that the resistance movement will emerge victorious and schools will start to move forward again.

But what exactly are these 21st Century Technologies, Skills and Learning of which they speak? A simple enough question indeed, but not so simple to answer. Well the first bit – 21st Century Technology – is relatively easy in that it’s widely taken to refer to the use of computers and the internet, even though it does not necessarily follow that the technology is being used to deliver appropriate 21st Century learning and skills – but we’ll save that discussion for a later post.  However what there definitely isn’t is a single, nicely defined, commonly agreed, all cleverly packaged-up in a box designed by Apple statement as to what what 21st Century Skills and Learning actually are. Here therefore is:

All Change Please!‘s Beginners’ Guide to a Real 21st Century Education

First, one of the most common classifications of 21st Century Skills builds on the 3Rs by adding the 4Cs:

• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Creativity and innovation

All Change Please! can’t help having a slight issue with the first of these however, in that critical thinking and problem-solving, while related, should be separated – problem-solving needs to be more closely linked to creativity. And then there’s the ‘I’ word – Innovation, which is often associated with creativity without any clear understanding of the difference between the two, and in reality has more to do with business practice.

Meanwhile abandoning the simplicity of the 4C’s, in this account here we see the welcome addition of Information Literacy and Responsible Citizenship to the list (Surely Citizenship is by definition responsible? Discuss.)  Hmm, with a bit of re-writing we could have a more memorable and marketable different set of 5Cs: Critical thinking, Communication and Information literacy, Collaboration, Creativity and problem-solving, Citizenship.

And here’s another approach:
Ways of thinking: Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning
Ways of working: Communication and collaboration
Tools for working: Information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy
Skills for living in the world: Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility

which has further evolved into:
Collaborative problem-solving. Working together to solve a common challenge, which involves the contribution and exchange of ideas, knowledge or resources to achieve the goal.
ICT literacy — learning in digital networks. Learning through digital means, such as social networking, ICT literacy, technological awareness and simulation. Each of these elements enables individuals to function in social networks and contribute to the development of social and intellectual capital.

And how about this account of 21st Century Learning?:

‘Equally important to 21st century learning is the application of learning science research and principles to learning methods and the design of learning activities, projects, assessments and environments. Principles of effective learning important to 21st century education practitioners include:

Authentic learning – learning from real world problems and questions
Mental model building – using physical and virtual models to refine understanding
Internal motivation – identifying and employing positive emotional connections in learning
Multimodal learning – applying multiple learning methods for diverse learning styles
Social learning – using the power of social interaction to improve learning impact
International learning – using the world around you to improve teaching and learning skills’.

All good stuff of course, and just a small sample of the wide range of indicators that 21st century learning is, or isn’t, taking place in a learning organisation. However, as All Change Please! has discussed before in 21st Century Schizoid Learning, most of these skills and approaches to learning were being explored back in the 1970s and 80s and so perhaps should more appropriately be called ‘End of the 20th Century‘ skills and learning – what schools should have been delivering from around 1975 to the turn of the millennium.

In the first decade of the 21st century a number of significant things have emerged. First, the advent of rapid change (predicted in Alvin Toffler’s FutureShock in 1973) is finally coming to pass: organisations and companies – and indeed educational establishments -  now need to be able to respond to changing needs and markets with new products and services potentially within around six months. For All Change Please! then, one of the essential things missing from so-called 21st Education is the notion of helping children learn how to deal with rapid, discontinuous and unpredictable change.

Secondly the impact of the internet has become a widespread disruptive force, changing the behaviours of the mass-population through social and commercial media. Although hinted at in some of of the accounts above, ‘media literacy’ (ie how digital content is produced, manipulated and distributed – and how to create it yourself) also needs to be a major priority.

And there does not appear to be any mention of the concept of Lifelong learning? At the same time there remains a need to completely redefine what might be considered as ‘basic’ knowledge, distinguishing between the grasp of essential underlying concepts and the facts that can now be easily found on the internet. And another thing – again something being anticipated back in the 1960s and 70s (and All Change Please! should know as it was there at the time) – are the 3Rs of Sustainability: Recycle, Re-use and Reduce. Ever read the Waste Makers?

So All Change Please!’s Campaign For Real 21st Century Education includes the need for:
• critical thinking
• creative, active, open-ended problem solving
• collaboration and competition
• flexibility in response to rapid, unpredictable change
• digital media / technological literacy
• initiating sustainable change
• 21st century knowledge
• learning how to learn for oneself

And finally something else that is still far from being a 21st Century solution is the process of the assessment and examination of learning which appears to be regressing into little more than a series of electronically generated and scored knowledge-based multiple-choice questions and answers. Only the e-scape project seems to offer a vision of completely new approaches to processes of assessment that utilise emerging technologies, rather than simply seeking to automate the old ones. Just as business now needs to rapidly respond to emerging fast-changing markets in an agile way, so does educational assessment. The model of developing a pre-specified, fixed course and final examination that takes five or so years to write, get approval for, publish, give schools adequate time to prepare for, and then commence delivering a two year course is no longer appropriate. A more flexible approach is now needed that is capable of responding much more quickly to learning emerging knowledge and skills, using computer technology to create new forms of examination or validation of what has been learnt, rather than what was specified to be learnt many years previously.

The sad fact is, despite having had more than 30 years to get ready for the challenges ahead, we’re still totally unprepared for the opportunities and threats of living in the 21st Century.

And finally, here are some people who for some strange reason don’t seem to agree with any of the above!

Michael Gove’s planned national curriculum is designed to renew teaching as a vocation
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/04/michael-goves-planned-national-curriculum-is-designed-to-renew-teaching-as-a-vocation/

The philistines have taken over the classroom | Frank Furedi | spiked

http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13497/

Don’t confuse me with the facts…*

Those of us who are lucky enough to be able to remember the late 60s and early 70s were saddened last week to learn of the passing of Kevin Ayers. A founder member of the experimental and highly creative jazz rock group Soft Machine, he then went on to find greater success leading his own band, and releasing some 17 albums.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/20/kevin-ayers-dies-aged-68

Now All Change Please! was surprised to read in all the obituaries that appeared the next day that Ayers apparently attended the Simon Langton school in Canterbury, where he met the other members of the Soft Machine. Now it so happens that All Change Please! taught at this exact same school during the 1980s, and there is clear documentation and recall evidence from staff who were there at the time that the other two other members of the band were indeed pupils there in the early 1960s. However as far as All Change Please! is aware there is nothing to suggest Ayers ever attended as well. On the cover biography notes of the first Soft Machine album, while it states that the other two were at the school, it does not name of the school that Kevin Ayers’ went to. And indeed checking Ayers’ own account he states he attended a boarding school (which Simon Langton wasn’t) and that he met the others in completely different circumstances, as confirmed in the ‘official’ Soft Machine Biography published in 2005.

But within hours of the publication of the obituary, Ayers’ Wikipedia entry had been updated to state that he attended the Simon Langton school in Canterbury (as evidenced by the Guardian Obituary), where he met the other members of the band. As such this will now doubtless pass into history as a fact, which it seems quite clearly isn’t.

So, Mr Gove, is it right to just teach our children the so-called facts, when the facts are subject to such misrepresentation and inaccuracy? The Kevin Ayers example is in itself of no great importance, but others are. Surely what really matters is that children learn that there are no such things as facts? Sources need to be carefully analysed, cross-referenced, and potentially challenged. And they also need to be taught not to believe everything, or perhaps even anything, that they read in the papers. Or, for that matter, on Wikipedia.

Meanwhile it is the proposed new History curriculum that has been widely reported in the press (diverting attention away from the even more inappropriate proposals for Design & Technology). As discussed here:

Why Too Much History is Bad History: The Proposed History Curriculum
http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2013/02/22/why-too-much-history-is-bad-history-the-proposed-history-curriculum/

it is clear the authors of the curriculum have a complete lack of understanding of how and when children learn.

The linear chronology only gets underway in KS2, between the ages of 7-11, when kids are expected to grasp a huge swathe of history, beginning with the Greeks and Romans (though I see no mention of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese or Indus Valley peoples), and then bomb emphatically through British history’s trajectory, from Stonehenge to the Glorious Revolution, via all the headline history that a 1950s textbook might include.

By the start of KS3, kids are 11.  When I was that age, I distinctly remember making a project book about mummification and tombs in Ancient Egypt – one which I found creative and thrilling – but our youngsters will instead hurtle headlong into Clive of India and the Age of Revolution. Soon after, they will be grappling with the US Constitution and Enlightenment philosophy…

Teachers will no doubt endeavour to enliven their lessons, but with such a curriculum they will struggle to captivate the imaginations of their young pupils, and that will be a fatal tragedy for the subject of history.

Children do need to acquire a ‘time-line’ of history, but this is just not the way to achieve it. Acquiring so-called facts in the context of a time-line is very different from learning everything only in the order in which it happened. And that’s a fact.

*According to that highly reliable source of all knowledge Wikipedia, ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts. I have a closed mind already’ was said by Earl Landgrebe during the Watergate hearings in 1974.

** But according to the far more reliable source of all quotations “Quote…Unquote’, the phrase dates back to a 1945 article in an advertising periodical, and the saying appeared on a sign on a prominent Democrat’s desk in 1954.

Update 3rd March 2013. All Change Please! is pleased to be able to report that history has now been re-written, and the offending Wikipedia entry has now been more accurately updated!

 

Going For Old?

Academics engage Vocationalists during a re-enactment of the English Civil War

A few days ago someone drew to my attention to a link to my post ‘Your Country Needs You‘ (published in October) that had been included on ‘Scenes From The Battleground‘s recent blog post. In return I am pleased to reciprocate a link, and hope he will get as many extra views of his site as All Change Please! has since enjoyed as a result.

http://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/attitudes-which-cause-dumbing-down/

In this post I want to discuss some of the arguments that Scenes From The Battleground and other academics often present to justify their approach to teaching and learning, i.e.:

•  since the introduction of the GCSE, all teaching and learning has been made less challenging, or ‘dumbed down’
•  an academic approach to teaching and learning is the only one that can provide a worthwhile education, is appropriate for everyone, and if they are all taught in academic way exam results will automatically improve
•  it is better to have had an academic education and fail, than to have any other sort of education
•  teachers advise working class children not to apply for university
•  employers are only interested in graduates with good academic degrees

It remains of great concern that some academics, rather like the managing directors of companies such as Comet, Jessops and HMV, fail to acknowledge that the world is changing almost beyond recognition, and that the old ways are no longer necessarily the best ways. We can no longer afford for our children to experience a re-enactment of an education system no longer fit for purpose.

Dumbing down

Scenes From The Battleground seems convinced that education has been ‘dumbed down’, and he attempts to provide evidence that supports his fears, compounded by the fact that, as he admits, the posts he has linked to have been written by intelligent and experienced educationalists.

The thing is, you don’t exactly need to be a rocket surgeon or a brain scientist to work out that if the numbers of students going to university since the 1970s are going to rise from around 10% to 50%, then either standards of teaching and learning are going to have to rise unbelievably, or the entry examinations are going to need to be made  easier to pass. Of course academic education has been ‘dumbed down’. So in that respect All Change Please! finds itself in complete agreement with Scenes From The Battleground, Mr Gove and others like them, in that standards of academic education in schools have fallen over the years, and that they justifiably do need to be raised.

The only way is academic

However, that’s about as far as our agreement goes. What Scenes From The Battleground really means is that there has been a lowering of academic expectations.  I would argue that at the same time there has been a raising of expectation and standards of technical and vocational ‘practical’ standards that are far more appropriate for the majority of students. There is also the frequent use by academics of the word ‘rigour’. Why do academics, politicians and journalists only associate ‘rigour’ with academic study? Rigour is something that can be and is applied to any area of study, be it in the Creative Arts, Business Studies, Physical Education, and so on.

Returning briefly to my ‘Going for Gold‘ Olympic medal analogy post, it’s like insisting that all athletes only prepare themselves for the rigour of the 100 metres. As a result, many swimmers, pole vaulters, marathon runners, etc., would never discover that their particular aptitude lay in a completely different discipline. (And I am equally concerned by the further comparison that only those athletes deemed likely to win a medal at the next Olympics will be given funding). The EBacc, as presently conceived, might well succeed in raising academic standards for a small minority, but at the same time will produce a much higher number of failures and disaffected teenagers.

Indeed the way Scenes From The Battleground sees the situation exemplifies exactly where much of the problem lies. While a few academics seem to have managed to join up the dots and grasp the bigger picture, for many a narrow academic education tends to produce people who only see the world from their own point-of-view. It worked for them, so it must be good for everyone, and all that needs to happen is for everyone to receive an academic education, and everything will be wonderful.

It is better to have tried and failed than never to have had an academic education

http://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/yes-those-were-definitely-examples-of-dumbing-down/
Having seemingly reassured himself that he is correct, in an up-date post Scenes From The Battleground states a commonly-held view amongst many academics:

‘It is better to make everyone try to get into a good university, and have a lot fail, than to write off so many of the able-but-poor like we do now. University should be a goal for all because a good education should be a goal for all and even in failing to achieve that goal, one may be given the means to achieve many other goals instead.’

Now this is a very contentious statement, and one I suspect few outside academia would agree with. First it has no regard for the future of the majority of students who would indeed fail to get to university, beyond the unsupported suggestion that as a result somehow they would be able to achieve ‘many other goals instead’. And it also quite wrongly equates university with being the only possible source of a worthwhile education.

Class Wars

Scenes From The Battleground also poses the question: “What would pushy middle-class parents make of this (non-academic activity)?” and suggests that they would perceive evidence of dumbing-down. If they were hoping their children were bound for a Russell Group university, then of course I would agree. But if a parent’s main concern is that their off-spring should find a worthwhile and well-paid job in the emerging economy – and that will in the future give them a good chance of enabling them to be happy and to live independently – then an increasing number are starting to realise that there is more relevant and up-to-date learning going on in some other more practical and less theoretical disciplines. And anyway, All Change Please!, like the majority of teachers, did not go into education specifically to meet the demands of the pushy middle-class parent, but the needs of all children, whatever their background.

‘Teachers cannot afford to be emphasising to kids that university is one goal among others, because the effect won’t be to deter the posh-but-thick; it will be to deter the working class’.

Scenes From The Battleground then goes on to discuss the much-used argument that social class remains the key factor in going to university (which indeed it may well be), and that teachers deter the working class from going there. I simply do not believe that the majority of teachers do this, at least not if the student shows the required level of potential academic ability and has the desire to do so. What they do do however, is to suggest that perhaps some students who are quite unlikely to achieve the necessary academic standards should consider alternative educational pathways that are more likely to enable them to succeed and obtain employment through more practically-related knowledge and experience.

Employability

Finally, and how many times does it need repeating, top company chief executives keep stating that what they need now is not graduates stuck in the old Industrial Age ways of memorising and recalling a prescribed, often out-of-date, body of knowledge, but life-long learners, creative risk-takers and collaborative problem-solvers willing and able to work flexibly to respond to ever-changing and entirely unpredictable markets that embrace instability. According to this article, today’s young people will find themselves living and working in the ‘Age of Chaos’, and will need to have a ‘Generation Flux’ mindset. I can only advise academics to stay in their ivory towers and lock the door firmly behind them!

http://designtaxi.com/news/355262/Are-You-Prepared-For-The-Workplace-Of-The-Future/

So why is it that at the same time though employers quite rightly complain that many school-leavers often lack, or are far from fluent in, basic numeracy and literacy skills? Perhaps this is because what they are being taught in schools is often too theoretical, and not grounded in the context of everyday, real-world problems?

Education needs to be appropriate for everyone, not just the academically-able.

Image credit: Anguskirk  http://www.flickr.com/photos/anguskirk/4944028963

Teaching and Learning in LA LA Land

No face, no name, just a number?

First All Change Please! would like to wish all its readers a very happy New Year.

Well, of course when All Change Please! writes ‘very happy’, it doesn’t mean it is full of optimism for education in 2013. In fact if anything, perhaps it should read: All Change Please! would like to warn all its readers of something to be afraid of in 2013. Very afraid of.

So what is this LA LA Land of which it speaks? La La Land is known as a state of semi-unconsciousness where everything is removed from the real world, and quite deranged. Most of us would probably agree that the ‘La’ in La La Land stands for the craziness of Los Angeles, or, if you work in government, Local Authority. But if you work in education, it seems like there’s something even more wild and wacky to worry about -  the wonderful world of Learning Analytics.

So what exactly are Learning Analytics? Apparently: ‘the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs’.

To explain Learning Analytics as simply as possible, each and every time a student visits a website, how long is spent there, which on-line tests are undertaken, the number of mistakes and attempts made, the time taken completing each online exercise, the time of day and day of the week, etc., the mouse click or keyboard command is electronically grabbed by a great database in the cloud and silently compared to trillions of other bits of data obtained from other learners. As a result it  becomes possible to make individual predictions about exactly where each learner is struggling and succeeding, what exact nugget of knowledge they need to review or acquire next, what digital resource they might find particularly helpful, and what courses – and careers – they are most likely to succeed at in later life.

It sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? Indeed, just think about Amazon and the way it cleverly keeps a record of all the books and DVDs you’ve ever browsed and then sends you completely inappropriate recommendations for things you might like. And how those annoying animated web page ads keep trying to recommend something you once showed an interest in and purchased several months ago. Except Learning Analytics claims to be poised to go way beyond that…

It all sounds very convincing doesn’t it, especially if you are an administrator charged with reducing the monthly teacher wage bill? And in the current economic situation, anything that saves money is bound to be a big winner.

However, here’s what Tony Wheeler has to say:

At a time when we’re all anticipating and working towards an education appropriate for the 21st Century that utilises the freedom of the world wide web for learning how to learn for one’s self, it’s alarming to think that coming up fast on the rails is an educational control tool beyond all previous control mechanisms, subverting the notion of ‘personalised learning’ into its own quality-controlled, mass-produced, impersonal education system that perpetuates the myth that knowledge is King: ”I know something you don’t and I have analysed how to pass it on to you down to the smallest nanobyte and now technology lets me measure you in infinitely microscopic blinks so that if you deviate from the predetermined track even by a millionth of an electronic bit we can nudge you back and make sure you all come out exactly the same shape and size”.

And don’t think it stops at the learners – this technology can be used to track teachers, managers and indeed administrators. Anyway, not to worry, you can’t see this coming to a school near you soon? These teachers certainly don’t seem to be bothered about it at all:

Teacher predictions: what will 2013 bring for education? http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2012/dec/31/education-in-2013-teacher-predictions

Perhaps they had better think again: Pearson buys SchoolNet  http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/apr/26/pearson-buys-schoolnet

Indeed All Change Please! controversially suggests that in just five years’ time, there will only be half the number of teachers, and that children will spend half their time at school plugged into a Pearsonalised electronic learning analytic interfaces.

And entirely without the aid of sophisticated date-driven analytics All Change Please! confidently predicts that Learning Analytics is a subject it will be writing a lot more about in 2013.

I am not a number, I am a free learner.

Image credits. Top: Derrick Tyson http://www.flickr.com/photos/derricksphotos/2329246714  Bottom: Paul G http://www.flickr.com/photos/the-g-uk/5654023124

Your Country Needs You…

As anyone who indulges in any form of creative thought and action will tell you, great new ideas and insights often emerge at the very moment you stop trying and do something else instead, such as eating, surfing the web or taking a shower – as opposed to sitting isolated in the school hall writing a three hour essay restricted to the use of pen and paper,

In the current economic climate we urgently need as many people as possible working in creative, high-skill, business-savvy, income-producing employment. All Change Please! would therefore like to suggest that at present we simply cannot afford for so many students to pursue the luxury of an academic education that in many cases leads to nothing more than high rates of graduate unemployment. What’s needed is a real long-term commitment to a first-rate, gold-standard technical and vocational education programme instead of yet another sad failure of the 1944 Education Act.  Keeping calm and carrying on is just not an option anymore.

And the current provision of school buildings – closely matched to a curriculum structure that divides everything up into neat, tidy, non-practical academic subjects to prepare everyone for entry into a Russell Group University – is certainly not the way to prepare for the 21st century challenges that lie ahead. We’re still a long way off establishing where the best places to learn actually are – but they are certainly not to be found in the traditional school infrastructure.

Your Country Needs You – not to become an academic!

MGM (Michael Gove Minister) Studios proudly present…

The Studio, Bournemouth High School for Girls, 1930s

No, not that kind of studio…

More work-based ‘studio schools’ announced

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18892984

All Change Please! is feeling a bit confused, which is of course not that unusual. One minute 50 Shades of Gove is calling for high standards of eBacc academic education for all and dismissing vocationally-related courses as being ‘soft’ subjects, and the next he is saying things like:

“Studio schools benefit both business and young people – they are a brilliant way for employers to  become involved in helping give young people what they need to get good jobs.

“They are aimed at children who learn in more practical ways and offer good qualifications alongside the kind of skills employers want.

“Studio Schools teach a rigorous academic and vocational curriculum in a practical way.

So perhaps some kind person could patiently explain to All Change Please! why working from 9 to 5 and spending four hours a week of work experience acceptably transforms much-ridiculed courses in subjects such as ‘gaming and digital futures’, ‘health and social care’, ‘catering and hospitality’, suddenly turning them from being a so-called ‘complete waste-of time’ into an equally so-called ‘rigorous academic and vocational curriculum’? Surely what really counts is the quality of teaching offered and the appropriateness of the course assessment procedures – and there doesn’t seem to be any mention of these things?

So what exactly is a Studio School? http://studioschoolstrust.org/node/3
In case you have not heard of them before, Studio Schools:

‘…pioneer a bold new approach to learning which includes teaching through enterprise projects and real work. This approach ensures students’ learning in is rooted in the real world and helps them to develop the skills they need to flourish in life.’

They are small schools for 300 14-19 year old students; and with year-round opening and a 9-5 working day, they feel more like a workplace than a school. Working closely with local employers, Studio Schools will offer a range of academic and vocational qualifications including GCSEs in English, Maths and Science, as well as paid work placements linked directly to employment opportunities in the local area. Students will gain a broad range of employability and life skills through the CREATE skills framework.

The unique CREATE skills framework has been designed specifically for Studio Schools and is comprised of a wide range of employability and life skills. CREATE stands for Communication, Relating to people, Enterprise, Applied skills, Thinking skills and Emotional intelligence.

I wonder if 50 Shades of Gove is actually aware of this? Because all this sounds to All Change Please! exactly like the sort of mamby-pamby, so-called progressive, let the kids do what they want and not make them learn any facts sort of approach that he is trying to totally eradicate from our schools?

Meanwhile All Change Please! can’t but help to see a remarkable similarity between the approach of the studio school with that of design education, established in the 1960s, but steadfastly ignored ever since.

Image credit: Alwyn Ladell 

Left, Right, Right, Right, Right…

OK. Hands up if you are fed up with current Tory education policy. Keep your hand up if you can’t wait for the day that Labour get back into power and starts talking sense about what should be taught in our schools.

Sadly, if you’ve still got your hand up it looks like you might be in for a disappointment, because nice Mr Twigg, nasty Mr Gove’s opposite number, has been recently expressing his shadow policies and has very successfully managed to blot his copy book. It seems that Mr Tiggywig is rather keen on supporting the idea of creating Military Academies. All Change Please! can only assume that, beyond the obvious benefit of providing employment for recently down-sized ex-service men and women, it will also be a convenient dumping parade ground for all those pupils who just don’t make the cut on the academic playing fields, sometimes referred to as ‘the poor and not very bright’.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18770387

For an alternative view, read these articles….. Wait for it you horrible looking lot…….NOW!

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/news/2012/07/military-schools-are-terrible-idea-discipline-no-substitute-education

http://behaviourguru.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/troops-to-teachers-who-do-you-think-you.html

Meanwhile Schools Minister Mr Gibb has been comparing the importance of learning tables by rote in order to be able to cope with higher-level maths with the need for future musicians to spend their childhoods practising scales. Now many, many years ago, All Change Please! dutifully did learn its pre-decimal 12 times table – and in those Imperial days even its 14 and 16 times tables – and admits it’s glad it did so. It probably even helped it gain a Maths O level, but when it came to A levels it was a whole different academic avoirdupois kettle of fish that didn’t equate to anything that would prove to be of any relevance whatsoever to its future life. And the moment that All Change Please! was introduced at a tender age to the rigours of practising musical scales it rapidly gave up all notions of eventually playing in a symphony orchestra and instead decided to settle for getting its head round the three-chord trick being applied to remarkable effect by the emerging popular and far more creative beat combos of the time. So no marks there, Mr Glibb.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9390294/Schools-Minister-rote-learning-vital-to-boost-maths-skills.html

Given that the educational policy changes currently being put in place seem unlikely to be substantially reversed within at least the next ten years, the only way forward is for education to seize the battle-gound and do something about it itself. A left-field initiative, such as the TVEI (Technical and Vocational Education Initiative) that emerged in the 1980s but was overwhelmed by the massed forces of the National Curriculum in the 1990s, is urgently needed – but by definition will be completely unexpected, and so we can’t be certain it will ever happen. Or perhaps it is time to adopt the individual school-based model used in many other countries where there is less emphasis on a national academic qualification and more on a school diploma, developed at a local level to meet the specific needs of employers and institutions in the region.

Unless something happens we are surely heading inexorably towards the fictional world of the 1950s, where there are glittering prizes for the minority academic elite, a lifelong sense of failure for the technical and vocationally-orientated majority, and for the rest, a thorough grounding in how to  march up and down, stand still and extinguish other people before becoming 21st Century laser-canon fodder themselves. As Douglas Adams didn’t quite put it:

‘In those days spirits were brave, the examination stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and Gove, Gibb and Twigg were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.’

The Unbearable Obsolescence of Learning

It may be a sad fact of life, but when something has ceased to be of any practical use or value, it needs to be disposed of. Dismantled. Torn apart. Recycled and re-purposed where possible, and the rest sent unceremoniously to the dump, before being replaced and updated by a brand new model that works a whole lot better – even if it maybe doesn’t last quite as long. And that’s exactly what needs to be happening to our current education system right now.

All Change Please! has recently come across three very different posts that are essentially about the same thing – the need for completely new approaches to teaching and learning, fit more for the remaining seven-eighths of the 21st century than the 19th. (Yes, this month we’re exactly 12 years and 6 months through the 21st century! Well, depending where you start counting from, anyway.)

The first: Unwilling to learn?
http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2012/06/unwilling-to-learn.html

This post endorses something that All Change Please! expressed a while back, that children do actually want to learn – it is after a basic survival skill – but that the problem is that we are not currently teaching them things they don’t see the relevance or need of, and don’t care about.

“Let’s put down the burden. Just set it down and walk away. Make schools places where the first job of adults is to discover who these kids are, and provide support, time and resources to help them become the people they want to be.”

Meanwhile in the (much needed) haste to reform the ICT curriculum, all those BBC Micro enthusiasts from the 1980s have taken the opportunity to get back to the good old days and promote the idea that everyone should take a course in Computer Science. Now I agree that all children should experience the basics of programming to discover if it’s something that appeals to them, but the thought that everyone should become coders is nonsense. So it’s good to read this post:

Let’s Not Call It “Computer Science” If We Really Mean “Computer Programming”
http://codemanship.co.uk/parlezuml/blog/?postid=1109

“Of all the mathematical sciences, computer science is unquestionably the dullest. If I had my time again, despite discovering just how much I love writing software, I still wouldn’t study computer science. I’d program, for sure. And I’d buy books on CS and learn what I need to make me a better programmer. Which is exactly what I did. It’s my deepest concern that we don’t put off a new potential generation of software developers by teaching them stuff that a. they probably won’t need to know, and b. will be taught at the expense of things they might actually find useful.

“The graduate would be able to write a program, but write a program to do what? … It’s no good being about to program if you don’t know anything of how to solve problems.”

And finally, designer John McWade on The Vanishing Master:
http://www.mcwade.com/DesignTalk/2012/05/the-vanishing-master/

“You spend a career mastering a craft, over decades becoming so deep, so knowing, so capable, that you are now the wise old man or woman to whom even teachers of teachers come for guidance. And then the craft vanishes, leaving what?  “That’s what’s going missing! We’re not making masters. The changes are coming so fast that everyone is always beginning.” ”…Skills, entire professions, especially in tech, now run a 100-year life cycle in a decade or less. No one gains the wisdom of years.”

Our education system has yet to really consider that impact on teaching and learning of the rate of change we are now experiencing. In the 1950s, you left school feeling you knew just about everything there was to know. These days you leave knowing virtually nothing in terms of the amount of global knowledge there is. And whereas before you spent a lifetime gaining experience and wisdom, now, if you are lucky, that experience lasts just six months before the world has moved on, long before any wisdom has begun to emerge. If it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, then it is important to discover early on in life what that skill might be.

At present, the majority of children moving from Year 1 to Year 11 spend more than than discovering that they are not cut out to spend the rest of their lives as an academic. And we need to ensure that the skills we need to master are as transferable as possible. Somehow we need to find a way of teaching essential and desirable skills and knowledge that will still ultimately lead to some sort of wisdom, while at the same time preparing children for a world in which the skills and knowledge they will actually need are, to a large extent, currently unimaginable.

The world of education is still tinkering with the past at a time when its approach is obsolete, and the time has come when it needs to be disposed of. Dismantled. Torn apart. Recycled and re-purposed where possible, and the rest sent unceremoniously to the dump – and, unlike the last three sentences, not just be repeated again sometime later when everyone has forgotten how inadequate it was the first time round.  Just as we need completely new processes of collaborative thought and action to deal with things like the global economy, future sources of more sustainable energy, the potential use of new and emerging electronic and bio-technologies, etc., so we need completely new processes of thought and action to deal with the requirements for a future education system that is flexible, appropriate, effective, and fit for purpose – well for the next six months into the future, anyway.

Image credit: Mattias Olsson  http://www.flickr.com/photos/maol/254171944

Living in the past?

Well, little did I suspect that last week’s ‘A brief history of dates‘ would be the post that would generate the most number of views – some three hundred – since ‘Thunderbirds are Gove’. All I ever wanted to do was to point out that history involves a great deal more than memorising dates, and that some students found writing academic essays inappropriate to their needs and abilities.

From the tweets and comments, it seems to have stirred up considerable resentment from a number of seemingly distraught, distressed, enraged and hysterical history teachers. On Twitter I’ve been labelled as ‘fashionably-minded’, accused of suggesting that history shouldn’t involve any factual knowledge at all, of not listening to points I didn’t want to hear, and that I wished to exclude teaching students how to write essay-style blogs (even if they wanted to). It’s also been suggested that I doubtless wouldn’t approve someone’s comment (I’ve approved everybody’s comments without exception). Oh, and apparently it seems I’m a ‘moron’ – a particularly clever and witty ripost for an academic, I thought.

And reading through some of the comments one could be forgiven for thinking that I had suggested that no-one ever needed to know anything ever again as it’s all on the internet, and that children should never be expected to write a coherent passage of text.

I must say I found the reference to the Ed Hirsch Jr., Spring 2000 paper ‘You can always look it up…or Can you?‘ interesting, particularly as it appears to have become the bible of the ‘knowledge recall comes first’ disciples, while at the same time not of course taking into account the significant and substantial way in which the whole nature of the internet has developed over the past twelve years. It also perpetuates the misbelief that so-called ‘progressive’ education involves 24/7 process-based learning for everyone, and that all students are best suited to academic learning.

At one level I agree with the proposition that having access to an ever increasing amount of information does indeed probably require a greater amount of pre-knowledge, and an even more general awareness of how the world works. But my purpose was to question the sort of knowledge we need to now have at our finger-tips, and to suggest that memorising detailed facts, such as certain dates, was perhaps becoming less necessary? And the other matter I questioned was not so much what should be taught and assessed, but how it should be taught and assessed. I can’t accept that what was referred to in one of the comments, as ‘direct instruction’ is the only, or the best way for all students to learn, or that formal essay writing is the most effective way for all students to be assessed. Curiously none of the academics chose to discuss those challenges.

Well, I must say I’ve learnt a lot about academically-inclined history teachers. And I can’t say I exactly envy them all having to force-feed all those extra future reluctant  ‘I never wanted to do this subject’ non-academic Bacc teenagers with loads of dates, battles and kings and queens. It’s a tough job, but I guess someone’s got to do it.

And here’s where you can buy the T-shirt! Image credit: Redmolotov.com 

Why I’m feeling none too exciTED

http://tedchris.posterous.com/behind-todays-ted-ed-launch#comment

On Tuesday, there was an announcement from TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) about the launch of TED-Ed, its latest initiative/mission ‘to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world’. Sounds great, but of course in reality it’s all about hosting short video clips of teachers lecturing students. So yet another case of ‘New technology, Old Learning‘. Though, to be fair, at least the TED videos, unlike most of the blackboard-based Khan Academy ones, involve the production of a good quality visual experience that makes the content more accessible, understandable and memorable. And they do at least ask the audience questions and promote curiosity. Which is great if you are following an intellectually academic pathway, but not so helpful if you are a different type of learner.

Now I’ve no objection to this as such, provided of course TEDEd continue to fund high production values and not rely on free second-rate contributions from Sunday afternoon wannabe video directors – but given the vast, incalculable number of ‘facts’ there are these days that they are going to need to cover, that seems somewhat inevitable.

But what really concerns me is the extraordinary enthusiasm with which this (and the Khan Academy) is being greeted by teachers, as if it’s the best thing since the invention of the ‘chalk and talk’ blackboard approach to education, and somehow heralds the start of the great learning revolution we’ve all been waiting for since, er.. the invention of the blackboard. So when we’re informed that:

- Video does indeed have a powerful role to play in education.
- It allows great lessons to be shared online with vastly bigger audiences.
- It allows teachers to show things that would be hard to show live in every class.
- It also can allow kids to learn at their own pace (hello, replay button).
- The best length for a video to be used in class is under 10 minutes.
- The best videos often use animation or other visualization techniques to deliver better explanations and more compelling narratives.

It’s as if back in the 1980s I had never thought to wheel the TV set and VCR into the classroom and showed my students a short video clip or programme that in somewhat enhanced the content of the lesson. At the time we also curated a video library that students were able to access and watch anytime, anyplace. Or that I had not been producing short ‘bite-sized’ audio-visual ‘slide-shows’ delivered over college networks for a FE publisher back in the mid/late 1990s. So what exactly is new?

But the real danger, as I keep going on about in this blog, is that the the process of learning becomes increasingly seen and understood by the public, and promoted by the politicians and media, as being about getting students to sit and passively watch knowledge-based video clips produced for free by enthusiastic teachers, followed by a series of computer-generated and marked multiple choice questions to supposedly assess ‘ability’. This may be more cost-effective, but isn’t education.

Meanwhile here’s what Tony had to say about TEDEd in a recent email…

‘Learning is not (just) ‘sage on the stage’ knowledge transfer. And even if it was, it is not linear (press play sit back and absorb with no interaction or changes in direction), and it is different when you record it as it stops being a living experience. It’s not even the difference between a live performance or a film of the live performance, or a film inspired by the live performance – you had to be there. It’s humming it on the way home and trying to play it and deriving new stuff from it, and painting to it and dancing to it.  It’s a starting point in an active process of doing and creating something of your own, not just a cerebral card collection of other people’s ideas.

And even if you can ignore this unforgivable misunderstanding of the learning process, the really evil thing about it is that it completely denies the existence of the learner as a participant with any contribution or difference or value or purpose of their own. How arrogant. It is the worst form of educational imperialism performed as monologues when at the very least it should be a structured dialogue, and at best an improvisation.’

Oh, and it’s good to know it’s not just Tony and me. Here’s someone else who has some some doubts:

http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.in/2012/03/khan-academy-not-good-pedagogy-and-not.html