LEARNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY
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Fact:
80% of jobs that the children beginning school now
will do when they leave school, have not yet been
invented… We remember knowledge that we value…
Question:
How do we best prepare our children for their future
careers and lives when technology is moving so quickly,
and we can only assume what it might be like then?
Reflect:
What do you remember being taught at school? What
would you have liked to know?
Often for me, when
studying Science or Social Studies topics, it was
the teacher imparting their knowledge of the facts-for
example-‘Photosynthesis’ or ‘The
Middle Ages’ and us rote learning or copying
from the board the same knowledge. Some topics held
great interest for me, others held none; I have retained
very little of this information.
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Question:
What do you think our children said when asked the
question, “What do you think we should be
teaching you now, that will prepare you best for
your future?”
Our school leaders
last year mentioned
"the importance of communication and values,
to learn how to have good self esteem and to learn
HOW to find out information, should they need to
…"
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education over a 10 year period we have had delivered
into our schools separate documents for each curriculum
area. Each emphasises the importance of each subject
with eight levels, numbers of strands, and numerous
Achievement Objectives beneath each strand.
The result has been
an “overcrowded curriculum,” where the
fear has been that we are simply skimming the surface
in a race to cover the perceived number of Achievement
Objectives, rather than teaching an area thoroughly,
where children gain a complete understanding.
With surveys conducted in New Zealand schools and
overseas, the Ministry of Education are currently
involved in a “Curriculum Stocktake” to
address this issue and to take heed of the rapid change
in the last 10 years anyway, particularly in relation
to technology and the many children that are entering
our schools from other places in the world.
We go back to the question: What is the best way to
meet our childrens’ needs now, and in the future?
The Stocktake team have revised the eight Essential
Skills, values and attitudes from the current curriculum
documents into five ‘Key Competencies”
which are the skills we believe are the key to present
and future education.
These are:
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Thinking (creatively, critically,
logically and reflectively)
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Relating to Others
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Belonging, Participating and Contributing
(both in a local and wider context)
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Managing Self (planning, persevering)
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Making Meaning (language, movement,
technology…)
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The Ministry of Education
Curriculum Stocktake is available in schools.
Working with these competencies, schools have been “given
permission” to “map the territory” to
implement programmes that teach these skills in a way that
best meets the needs of the children they have in their
community.
We of course will still
teach reading, writing, maths content and skills …
but this will certainly improve the way in which we teach
subjects like Technology, Science, aspects of Health, and
Social Studies.
Murrays Bay Intermediate School has elaborated
on the Key Competencies to provide a leveled scaffold
for the teaching of skills, and for assessment purposes.
Each term has a different theme
titled with a “fertile question”. A fertile
or clever question allows for real thinking, is open,
could be moralistic, ethical, and allows for more questions
to be triggered.
Children cannot find a page about the Middle Ages on the
internet and print it off for their assignment. Children
may be asked instead, the question, “Is life better
now, or in the Middle Ages?” A slight adjustment,
but to answer this question, it requires lengthy research
into then and now, and as you delve deeper, you question
more - does it depend on where you are living now, or
what your class was back then, the complexities of life
then and now … no two answers will be the same and
it is open to interpretation and opinion …
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For children at Murrays Bay, this
term’s fertile question is “Nature
V Nurture-How does this affect me?” Children
will derive their own question from this one in
relation to what THEY want to find out. Perhaps
they want to ask: “Are we naturally good
at things? If we’re not good at something,
then how do we become so?”
Children will be taught
how to ask and find information from a variety
of sources, not just the internet, but books,
interviews, by phone, fax, letters, e-mail….,
then will be taught how to skim and scan, be discerning,
and then communicate to others what they find
out.
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This could be in a myriad of ways from
PowerPoint, to a speech, a video or a model. We will not
have a “production line” of the same diagrams
and paragraphs in books, and everyone will have the benefit
of being educated about their peers’ findings.
Planning is completed as
a Mini School team, utilizing all expertise to create a
grid that uses Multiple Intelligences (using music, movement,
language, maths, people … to help students learn best)
and Blooms Taxonomy (levels of thinking from simply being
able to recall something heard to being able to create something
new). This will cater for many different learning modalities
and levels of ability in each classroom.
Within this grid there is
an Authentic Learning Task. For our Nature V Nurture theme
we are assisting children to plan and implement a personal
health or fitness goal. This provides a meaningful experience
that has a purpose for learning. Other real-life experiences
our children may have are to be able to stage a debate on
a controversial issue, to work alongside a Business Partner
to make a real contribution to the community. This could
involve creating an eye-catching banner to advertise a new
product, developing an advertising campaign to promote recycling
in the community, or a tree planting programme in the local
parks…
The idea is that the children
are highly motivated because they own the question. They
will gain knowledge that they will value and remember, and
learn the skills that pertain to the Key Competencies.
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with this, children will have opportunities spread
throughout the day / week to be involved in other
activities relating to the theme. We will be teaching
them about themselves and how they learn best, about
how their brains work, their Multiple Intelligences;
to maybe digitally record their autobiography or write
their own CV to date. Homework activities will relate
to this theme also, so you will know what we are learning
about in the classroom.
An important shift I think for both teachers and students
is that the teacher is not the only one who will impart
information (and the classroom is just one place where
learning occurs). |
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All
people in the learning environment have the power to hold
and to share the knowledge. The teacher is a facilitator
that promotes and empowers others by teaching them the skills
to activate unlimited information.
We hope our children will
become independent, critical and creative thinkers, self
motivated, good communicators, and risk takers who are ready
to face the challenges ahead.
The difference is, it is
“just in time learning,” which is meaningful
and purposeful, not learning something “just in case”
we need it.
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