There are two separate conversations about what should happen in education at the moment, and both are doomed unless we connect them as soon as possible.
Many in my online network of educators, and the broader ‘ed-tech world’, have been complaining loudly over the last few years at the rise of standardised testing and accountability to what they would label ‘20th century skills’. This increased focus and accountability on ‘20th century skills’ seems to cut directly against everything they are trying to achieve in education. They wage covert wars against school management to almost secretly be using digital tools more, or having inquiry projects or genius hours or whatever it is that they feel builds the skills and understandings they believe kids need, that is, the ‘21st century’ type. Their mentality can often be one of fighting against the system, an ‘us against them’ approach. The more extreme in my network put student agency at such a high value that they promote constructivism almost exclusively, and degrade any value of set curriculum content, wanting to focus solely on a skill set in preparing kids for the modern world.
On the other side, the politicians and people at a curriculum and assessment writing level are frustrated by the simple lack of ability for teachers to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills, particularly in Primary schools. It seems to them that teachers don’t know how to teach spelling or basic numeracy understandings. They are saying, stop ‘innovating’ and doing ‘fluffy’ inquiry or technology things and get back to explicit teaching of what our kids need in order to read, write and be numerate.
So who will win out? After more than a decade in the industry, my conclusion is this: as difficult as it may seem, it is in all our best interests to bring these two sides of the education world together, not in a way that finds compromises to both in order to achieve some sort of agreement, but in what might be called a third way. A new way of seeing our education system that does away with this polarity altogether. Or, perhaps its an old way. Remember 15 years ago when we all just talked together about best practice teaching and learning – before ‘e-learning’ divided us all?
Here we go, another ‘we need to re-think education talk’ I hear you saying. But what I’m arguing is different to the ‘scrap all the old school ideas and start again’ mantra of so many celebrity ed-tech evangelists.
What I am saying is that we need to see that both sides of this education debate are right and need to be listened to.
You can’t build digital literacy without ‘traditional’ literacy skills. And a student is not literate in 2014 if you limit that literacy to only paper and pen. One thing needs the other.
The longer we talk about things like ‘e-learning’ as separate to learning, or ‘21st century skills’ as opposed to ‘20th century skills’, the longer we’ll be polarising the debate, separating the experts, and delaying meaningful and effective change in our schools.
Lets cut all the ‘us vs them’, ‘20th vs 21st century’ and ‘how terrible is our education system’ talk. We need to move towards a place where we simply recognise what skills and understandings are important for our children to have right now in our society and in the foreseeable future and plan our school programs around them. Clearly that will includes both traditional forms of literacy and numeracy AND newer ideas of digital literacy, citizenship, coding etc, as well as creativity, collaboration, ‘learning how to learn’ etc. It is also bound to include constructivist approaches to learning, such as play based and inquiry learning, as well as explicit teaching and (shock horror) even rote learning (its how I remembered how to spell most of these words for example). All of these approaches are proven to be successful and are appropriate in particular contexts.
There is no use waging a war against standardised testing such as NAPLAN. The simple fact is, you need to be teaching your kids to read and write, and as a society we need some way to measure how well we are achieving this. Students still need traditional literacy skills as a foundation for everything else. Similarly, saying there should be no content in a curriculum, or no explicit teaching, is crazy. “Direct instruction and formal curriculum content are pointless and kids can teach themselves everything they need to know.” These statements are just not true. Particularly for my 6 year old, who really needs someone that will help him learn how to read, and write and be numerate, and to begin to understand the world and his place in it…just like every other 6 year old for the last 100+ years.
Its just as crazy to argue that in order to do these things better we should be leaving aside using digital tools or engaging in pedagogies such as inquiry learning to build the skills that are often given the ‘21st century’ badge.
Kids need both! We need to get these two sides of the argument together and stop the needless polarity.
So how do we do this?
The first step is in the language we use. Language is a key factor in how people think about something, and goes a long way to forming their beliefs about it. The language we use frames how we see the world.
I’ve long been arguing against terms such as ‘e-learning’ (hence the name of this blog!). Learning is learning. We don’t differentiate every other type of learning with titles. There is not ‘pen learning’, or ‘pencil learning’. Neither should there be ‘e-learning’. These terms were coined at a time when we were trying to get computers in education ‘off the ground’ and accepted into schools. They were new and special and different and we needed special ways to refer to what they could do for us. That time has well and truly past. These terms are no longer helpful.
Terms such as ‘e-learning’ are nonsense terms that actually highlight the fact that your school doesn’t incorporate technology well at all, even though they are intended to communicate the exact opposite. If you did incorporate technology seamlessly in your teaching and learning, you wouldn’t need a term for it. Its just part of what you do. It’s just learning.
Similarly, differentiating ‘21st century skills’ from others has become more damaging to the cause than helpful. It’s a polarising term that almost condescends to those in management or government positions that are pushing the importance of traditional literacy and numeracy skills. And like ‘e-learning’, it exposes the fact that we still don’t get that ‘21st century skills’ aren’t special or different (most of them were just as valuable in the 20th century), they’re on level with all the other skills that our students need.
It’s a long and difficult road to building better education systems and meet the needs of our current generation of students. And we can only get there by seeing each side of the current polar arguments and realising that we need to work together to move forward.
