Education for the Future

Thanks to Leigh Hyne's recent blog post  I viewed the video of an interview with the OECD’s Director for Education and Skills Andreas Schleicher. The video is an hour long but worth watching as there are many interesting points raised that are relevant to New Zealand (and indeed worldwide) education.



Schleicher was asked (35:39) what was the most important thing a teacher could do to prepare students for their future?  His reply was to stop thinking about preparing students for jobs, jobs will look totally different in the future. In science, for example, we spend too much time on teaching content and too little time teaching students to design experiments and think like a scientist.

This fits really well with my views around the need for an inquiry approach and the use of authentic contexts for learning. Students need to do the work that would be done by those working in the discipline in the community, in science they need to do what scientists do, in art they need to do what artists do.

Schleicher went on to say that coding, for example, will look totally different when younger students leave school. This fits with my view that the coding itself is not the important part. The problem-solving and computational thinking will still be relevant, the ability to think logically, to break tasks down into parts and see patterns, to design solutions, to de-bug when things don't work and to re-design, these skills will still be useful and valuable. This is especially important to keep in mind as we consider the draft of the new Digital technologies area of the curriculum.

Schleicher believes that education systems need to have core values and everything that is in or added to the curriculum needs to be examined against those core values. This works at both a government level and an individual school level.

Schools in New Zealand have to develop their own school curriculum and their core values need to be a the heart of this. This is not always the case. Most schools have worked on developing these sets of core values as part of developing their vision and mission statements but there are still some that have not applied these when developing their school curriculum. Schools that have done this well, Te Kowhai Primary for example, have seen the benefits for their students

Schleicher also talked about early childhood education (49:34) and how formalisation of learning is doing more harm than good and that we need to let children play and socialise,  which proponents of play-based learning would be heartened to hear.

It was interesting to hear the question (51:47) from Mark Treadwell, a New Zealand educator, on how we overcome the lack of understanding around what is the difference between knowledge, an idea, a concept and a concept framework. There is a definite need to develop common understandings around what these terms mean as it impacts on both curriculum design and implementation.

Schleicher emphasised that we need to teach fewer things at greater depth, to get to the root of the discipline, to foster students' talents. Japan, for example took 30% of material out of their curriculum and it resulted in an increase in creative skills and creative problem solving. He  remarked on the tendency of schools to prioritise the urgent over the important. Just having more learning time does not equate to better outcomes (Pisa data shows a negative correlation).  He asserts that we need to help students find their passions, what they are good at, what is going to serve a social purpose.

UDL and Task Design

I listened to Lynne Silcock* last week talking about Universal Design for Learning (UDL). There are a few misconceptions around UDL with probably the most common one being that it is only for students with "special needs". The U in UDL however stands for universal, meaning it is for everyone. Lynne talked about two important aspects of this, firstly knowing your learners and secondly designing for the edges. 

Knowing your learner includes not only their academic abilities but also their cultural and home background, their interests, how they best access the curriculum etc. If we design for the middle, as most commonly happens, those at the lower levels will struggle and the higher levels will be bored. Designing for the edges means most, if not all learners will be able to complete the task.  

When designing tasks there are two questions to keep in mind, and readers of my blog will find no surprises here. We need to ask "What is the purpose of this activity?" and "Why is it important for these learners?". 

Hopefully your school will have a well-designed school curriculum (more on this in later post) which will mean they have consulted all stakeholders and established what is important for their learners. If this has been done then question of importance for the learners has already been answered. If not, before giving a task to students, ask yourself why it is important for them to know/do this. If you don't know the answer to this question either change the task, or if it is in your school curriculum, raise the question with your senior management. On a side note, if the answer is "because it is in the test", the next questions are "Why is it in the test?" and "Should it be in the test?".

As for the purpose of the activity, this is something I have blogged about before and is something I feel very strongly about. In relation to UDL the purpose should guide the task design. Lynne gave an example of a task that hasn't been devised with UDL in mind, "Read this book about the Treaty of Waitangi and write an essay which outlines the main points." To make this more accessible this could be reworded as "Read this book and/or watch this video on the Treaty of Waitangi and create a presentation in your preferred format (eg. oral, dramatic, musical, Google Slide presentation, video etc.) that demonstrates your understanding of the main points'. 

Both achieve the same purpose but the second task allows a much wider range of students to access and complete the task and fulfill the purpose. Of course you could go further and develop this into a rich inquiry, but that is another story.

For more resources on UDL check out my LWDT Support site and Pinterest board.

*Lynne Silcock is a Learning With Digital Technologies (UDL focus) facilitator and an adviser at the Connected Learning Advisory Service

I have been unable to find the original source of the cartoon which has been around for quite a while, if you know please tell me so I can attribute it, get permission or remove it.