12. Respond on
Command w/
Precision
Follow
Instructions w/o
Question
Great for Soldiers
& Factory
Workers
13.
14. Critical Thinking
Innovative Problem Solving
Diverse
Agility & Adaptability
Open
Self- Initiative & Leadership
Autonomous
Collaboration & Cooperation
Interactive
Curiosity & Imagination
Personalized
Accessing & Analyzing
Information
15.
16.
17.
18.
19. R
R
R R
R
R
R R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R R
R
R
R
R
R R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
R
Editor's Notes
Roughly translated to: it’s hard to sleep with those thoughts buzzing through my head.
The main buzzing thought: There is a huge gap between what we know and what we do in education.
We know each student is different Yet we treat them the same
We know students learn best in different waysYet we homogenize their learning experience
Students are grouped by agePut in batches of 20-30In rows of desksClasses are taught in 40 minute segmentsAnd controlled by rules and regulations
Govt. determines contentTeachers distribute information for students to memorizeStudents memorize the information to take testsThe great new advancement in the past 60 years is that we now penalize the school and the teacher if the students fail to pass the tests.
So, how did we get here? It started with Thomas Jefferson and the great idea that all children should receive an elementary education.Horace Mann continued the mission but added the prophetic and fatal : the education should be standardized withsimilar concepts & ideas should be taught throughout schools & age levels.
Not much changed over the next 100 years as we were embroiled in war for most of that time. Then WWII ended. We had 5 years of blissful mass production of cars, goods and babies.Then the Russians launched Sputnik and the race was on. We entered a culture driven by fear of nuclear annhialation.The national defense and education act focused attention and money on science, math, foreign language and technical education – leaving the arts and humanities in the dust.
Between 1950-53 our country was faced with training & teaching: 3,000,000 new soldiers(Korean War), 4,500,000 new students(Baby Boomers) and 400,000 new teachers
President Truman & General MacArthur “put their heads together”, combined military training techniques and the American Industrial Model and came up with the American Education system as we know it.
This was the military culture of: stand in line, follow the rules, awaitnstruction, you are not an individual, you are not to question, you are not to think meeting the controlled, repetitive, structured, linear sequenced environment of the industrial model.
The problem is, now we live in a different world that requires different skill sets. Our education system is not training factory workers anymore. As well, Our soldiers are not engaged in the same kind of combat.
We require these skillsets: critical thiking, creativity, agility and adaptability, innovative problem solving, lateral thinking, imagination, collaboration and cooperation. And we need to be able to rapidly find and vet information.
Our education system is constructed to mass produce homogenous goods (our children). It relies on standardization to function. In terms of changing to meet the needs of today it cannot – our education system hasn’t fundamentally changed in 125 years. This centralized (hub and spoke) model is slow to adapt and change because every little adjustment has to come from the center out – this process is inefficient, expensive & time consuming. It’s not even succeeding at what it was built to do – because people are not machines, they have different needs, abilities, desires, cultures, interests, values…I started this presentation by saying what keeps me up at night is the fact that we don’t do what we know in education. We know that the best education is a personalized one. One that responds and adapts to the individual. BUT we have a system that CANNOT accommodate that. We keep driving home standardization when we know – just the opposite is in order. Because standardization is the only thing the current system can produce.
We need a new model:1. One that can support diversity an personalization at any scale (3 students or 300,000)One that has autonomy – so teachers can react in real time to students needs and to the changing environmentOne that has openness – barrier free entry to all learnersOne that has interactivity – so we can best tap the available talent and resources and have access to the most current information
The new model has to be adaptable, agile, resilient, sustainable, able to reallocate resourcesrapidly, it has to share, cooperate, collaborate – all sounds pretty familiar huh.And it all sounds pretty utopianly impossible. AND it has been impossible… until recently. Technology and the ready access of information, our ability to find it, organize it, rethink it, repurpose it, share it and share our thinking about it – gives us the ability to realize personalized education. We can connect people (teachers and students) who share interests, values and abilities. We can reallocate our resources without the limits and expense of physical location. We can fully utilize all of the talents of the teaching pool – redirecting teachers toward what they do best. We can identify their weaknesses and provide training specifically to help them improve.
The eco-freak-vision of utopia may not be so far off – systemically that is – because the organization of the model that does all of theses things, surrounds us everywhere in nature – In fact, it makes us. It describes how our bodies function and how our brains work.
In education the model looks something like this: eliminating the physical bounds of the classroom to share resources, talents, information, the process of learning thru experience, interaction, dialogue, and creating of new things. And with technology we have the ability to do this right now – we just have to…