FuturEd Handout

FuturEd Handout

• 1.
  FuturEd: Questions toConsider about the Future of Education by Chris Shade This session is based, in part, on the book Shift Ed: A Call to Action for Transforming K–12 Education 1st Edition by David E. Houle and Jeff Cobb. For more information, visit http://davidhoule.com/books/shift-ed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCGV1tNBoeU Innovators are natural contrarians. (What box?) Here are a couple of thoughts and questions you can use to arouse contrarian instincts.
• 2.
  The form ofschool right now is a box: boxes in a calendar, box buildings, box classrooms. Boxes suggest borders, boundaries, and neatly defined spaces and ideas, but in a world where borders and boundaries are increasingly blurred, where ideas flow and change with a speed unmatched in history, boxes are not the form upon which our schools should be based, physically, psychologically, or intellectually. The extent to which schools should have a standardized form at all is perhaps one of the biggest questions with which we need to wrestle as we consider the future of our educational system. The question is partly about buildings and physical architecture, but it is more about nonbuildings and physical architecture. As we have the increasing freedom to access knowledge and educational resources through the web, mobile phones, and other sophisticated communication devices, we have to question what is gained—and what is lost—by confining our children within four walls for pre-established periods of time to be fed content that fits within a predefined set of measurements. Why do we expect that shipping our children off to drab, confined, linoleum-paved containment areas each day would result in the types of motivated, creative individuals we need to carry our society forward in this new century? Technology advances not only greatly reduce the need for physical infrastructure like traditional classrooms and libraries, they ensure that the majority of learning activity going forward will happen across digital networks and not within four walls.
• 3.
  Now that everythinghas moved to the cloud – a place where data and applications are no longer confined to a specific server box, but distributed across a far-flung network infrastructure…We need to do much more than simply rearrange the chairs in our classrooms or knock down a few walls. We need to break out of the box entirely. A transformed school will not look like that brick building set apart from the society it is intended to serve. A transformed school will be an integrated part of the community and its students will be active participants in and contributors to the community. A transformed school will look more like life. Schools must become community centric. The education of our young must take place in a much more integrated way with the communities they will be a part of as adults. There are two communities into which schools must be fully integrated: they physical, local community in which they serve children daily; and the virtual, global community to which they connect. There is no reason community libraries, community centers, and community colleges could not share a common infrastructure. Currently, each of these institutions has its own budget, buildings, and its own bureaucracy. Even leaving aside the benefits of deeper connection and integration, in an age of shrinking funding, for each of these institutions to exist in a silo is madness. At a minimum, we should encourage the availability of primary health care providers in the schools for a few hours, but it would also make a great deal of sense for there to be health care facilities permanently collocated with school facilities. Going to the final step, we should move toward school facilities that are not separate at all from other parts of our communities, including the places where we shop and do business. Imagine a thriving hub at the center of the community that incorporates basic activities of everyday life like shopping for groceries, getting a haircut, renewing a driver’s license, or [laundering clothes or] picking up clothes at the dry cleaner.
• 4.
   What doesthe school building of the 21st Century look like?  Is “the school” only – or even mostly – a physical place?  If not a boxlike classroom, then what?  How can the buildings where we teach our young be more integrated into society? Of course, learning must focus on something, and it makes sense for there to be a well-articulated set of standards along the lines of the TEKS or the Common Core. But in world where content proliferates at an exponential rate and the borders between nations and cultures grow blurrier daily, there is no way anyone can claim to know a set of core content that best meets the future needs of our students. Today, we are connected globally. It’s as if we are returning to Pangea.
• 5.
  Until 1900 humanknowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today, knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours. Or put more simply… The world is now 24/7/365, but education is not. That has to change. The first step is to decided that standardized school years and school days for all ages at all stages of the K-12 educational process are no longer valid. They do not align with the current world of work. Vacation should not be eliminated entirely, but rather distributed into breaks throughout the year.
• 6.
  When formal schoolingwas first established, the school calendar fit the needs of a particular community. When families became more mobile, the school calendar was standardized. The current 9-month calendar that most schools operate on was established when 85% of Americans (and students) were involved in agriculture, and when climate control did not exist in school buildings. In today's United States, only about 3% of Americans are engaged in agriculture. Summer learning loss from http://www.summerlearning.org/?page=know_the_facts: To succeed in school and life, children and young adults need ongoing opportunities to learn and practice essential skills. This is especially true during the summer months. Many Americans have a wonderful image of summer as a carefree, happy time when "kids can be kids,” and take for granted the prospect of enriching experiences such as summer camps, time with family, and trips to museums, parks, and libraries. Unfortunately, some youth face anything but idyllic summer months. When the school doors close, many children struggle to access educational opportunities, as well as basic needs such as healthy meals and adequate adult supervision. Did You Know? All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning
• 7.
  of the summer(White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992; Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004). Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement, despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper, 1996). More than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher- income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. As a result, low-income youth are less likely to graduate from high school or enter college (Alexander et al, 2007). Children lose more than academic knowledge over the summer. Most children—particularly children at high risk of obesity—gain weight more rapidly when they are out of school during summer break (Von Hippel et al, 2007). Parents consistently cite summer as the most difficult time to ensure that their children have productive things to do (Duffett et al, 2004). http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.summerlearning.org/resource/collection /CB94AEC5-9C97-496F-B230-1BECDFC2DF8B/Research_Brief_04_- _Cooper.pdf All children go to school the same number of hours and the same number of days. This fact alone confirms that we are sorting children as opposed to educating them to their highest levels of achievement.
• 8.
  As long aswe hold time constant for teaching, learning, and testing, we are sorting children based on the speed of learning, not based on intelligence. What if we were to abolish traditional grades in favor of standards-based grading? What if we were to abolish grade levels entirely and instead work each student to help him/her advance according to his/her own ability?
• 9.
  The real issuewith curriculum has less to do with the specifics of the content or the particular skill sets to be taught and more to do with how we support learning experiences that combine the two effectively. Nearly everything we currently know about effective childhood learning points to smaller classes and more individual attention; toward group and project-based work; toward deep involvement of those who are most about the children, most importantly parents and grandparents. At the same time, everything about our legacy, factory model school systems as well as the constraints of the Industrial Age work schedules prevents us from pursuing these strategies even if we were to muster the collective will to fund them properly. Shift to thinking about learning experiences, not education systems. Today, people want to experience, to participate, and to be engaged. They look for personalized experiences that are unique, productive, motivating, enjoyable, and meaningful. • Does the idea of a common, standardized curriculum make sense in a hyper connected, rapidly changing world? If so, what are the critical points of commonality and standardization and what are the ways in which it makes sense to customize education to the needs of individual learners? • How do we best determine the balance between teaching content and teaching skills? • Does education change by country as each country finds it place in a more integrated, connected, and complementary global economy? • What is the ideal school year and school day? • What grade levels should we have and are they related to age? Is the traditional concept of grade levels even of value any longer? The current assessments measure students’ abilities to solve existing problems and give answers to predefined questions. Such assessments are antithetical to challenging, encouraging, and measuring students’ abilities to create new solutions, identify new problems, and ask new questions.
• 10.
  Sir Ken Robinsonshared the following statistic: The NFL is a $9-billion-dollar industry. Hollywood is an $11 billion dollar industry. Standardized assessment? $16 billion.
• 11.
  SAT is notgoing to get you very far with predicting who’s going to do well in college; and certainly not far with regards to who is going to do well in society or contribute to society. A study of nearly 123,000 students in over 30 different types of colleges and universities that have made standardized tests optional found no significant different between those who submitted SAT or ACT scores and those who did not (five-on-hundredths of a GPA point and six-tenths of one percent in graduation rates). US students have been awful test takers for over a half century. The awful test scores American students have received over the past half century should have rendered the US an economic backwater. The country should have hit rock bottom in national security, jobs, and economy by now. But facts suggest otherwise. The more sophisticated you are, the less you can measure
• 13.
  A number ofstrength-based assessments have been developed. HOPE MOTlVATlON Hope, motivation, and mindset Social and emotional intelligence
• 14.
  Creative thinking Global competence •How do we best assess students to ensure they are ready for a global society in the 21st century?