Shift to the Future

There is a lot being written about what learning needs to become and how to inform learners, and those that have an interest in their learning, of their progress.  We all need to be effective learners: students in school, adults living life, and employees.  Will Richardson in his book Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere says “The World has changed – and continues changing – rapidly and radically when it comes to the ways in which we can learn, and what knowledge, skills, dispositions, and forms of literacy our children will need to flourish in their futures.” (Kindle 65) and “what happens inside of schools is going to change, now that the Web connects us the way it does.  It has to.” (Kindle 75). I wouldn’t limit this view to schools, this applies to all of us regardless of what we do in life or to earn our living.  There is a relentless march of change driven and accelerated by technological progress and inven...

There is a lot of talk about 21st century this and 21st century that and our education system is not immune to throwing new buzz words around for our century.  Certainly there are important conversations to have with respect to what we expect students to become and how they will contribute to their local community, country, and our world.  What is it that students should know?  What behaviours should they possess?  What skills should they acquire?  What is the purpose of an education?  How should educators prioritize what is to be known?  The pace of change is exponential so how can we continue to teach kids to memorize dates, names, and places that they will likely never remember or care about?  What value is there to memorizing easily findable facts and figures?  I believe we will be navigating some pretty storming days ahead while we sort these things out… In the February 2012 issue of FastCompany , I read an article about the Generation...

School systems are faced with two major forces that I believe will cause sweeping changes: personalized learning and technology.  Personalized learning means different things to different people but it will likely involve significant changes for how teaching occurs, how students learn and demonstrate learning, who’s responsible for learning, how learning is assessed, what core knowledge should be, what skills must be learned, etc. along with a growing reliance on technology.  Turning to technology, there are some very significant trends occurring that will affect learning and teaching but also have a disruptive impact on the work of Information Technology (IT) departments.  The sky’s the limit when we’re talking about the future… Personalized Learning Teachers have an increasingly complex job to perform.  I was at a conference last week where one of the keynote speakers surveyed the audience on what the most important factor was for them being successful in schoo...

I think one of the more complex aspects a teacher has to wrestle with is assessment and what is worth knowing or what should be understood.  There are many writers, speakers, workshops, etc. on how student learning should be assessed for learning, of learning, how to gather evidence, how to inform teaching, etc.  I’m not a teacher but if I was, I would find that my job has become much more difficult with all the expectations to backward design my lessons, cover an ever broadening curriculum, give my students continuous feedback, and then somehow differentiate learning to meet the abilities, readiness, preferences, and needs of my students.  Not only am I expected to undertake assessment of learning but now I have to make sure to assess for learning. Add to this expectations to integrate and use technology for teaching, to enable my students to use technology for their learning, to give them more control over their learning, and learn the new math curriculum…  It al...