3. From Teaching to Diving: Memorizing Facts Is Not Good Enough. The Future Requires Thinking Skills
10+ Disruptive Factors Transforming the World of Education and Learning — Consequences, Opportunities, Tools
We are evolving to a new understanding of what learning is.
Education and teaching are undergoing major transformations as new approaches to learning, where the student is not just a recipient but an active explorer of the new terrain to be comprehended, replace traditional attempts to “transfer knowledge” from those who have it to those who don’t.
We are slowly but definitely moving away from mass predetermined learning curricula and rote-memorization of specific information, to a personal exploration, discovery and sense-making approach of what we are truly interested in pursuing in our lifetimes.
Look at northern European countries like Finland, Denmark or Sweden, or at new school movements and approaches and, across the board, this is what you will see: the student becomes the center and director of his own learning path, and it is he who chooses and decides where to direct his time, energies and attention.
The school, the university, the teacher and professor all become facilitators, guides, hubs that help and support the student in his self-directed learning path.
Curation is a practical method to study, research and inform oneself that brings together all of these new traits.
If, in fact, the true goal of education is not to indoctrinate people with a mass predesigned curricula of subjects to master, but rather the one of helping people learn how to learn, to know where to look for something and to be able to identify which information bits are most relevant to achieve a specific goal or objective, then curation is and will be of uttermost importance to the future of education and learning.
“I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it should work.”
- Maria PopovaBrain Pickings, 2013
Old teaching approaches work mostly around blindly memorizing facts and information and the consequences, as reported by Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), is that 36-percent of college students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during their college educations.
New learner-centered methods engage more students and give them the opportunity to build a personal understanding of a topic, by taking in greater consideration the learner and the process by which he builds knowledge and understanding.
“What defines mainstream education is its view of the learning process:
Knowledge is seen as an established, objective, authoritative body of facts outside the learner’s experiences or personal preferences, and the role of the educator is to transmit this knowledge, along with accompanying academic skills and attitudes, to the learner’s mind.
The transmission model denotes a one-way, largely authoritarian process. The educator is in charge and holds the authority to evaluate learning according to how well learners meet his or her expectations.
According to a transmission understanding of education, instruction is “delivered” and classrooms are “managed” as efficiently as possible.
…the ideal education embraces the exact opposite of transmission: It centers on a learner’s entirely self-motivated exploration of whatever the world has to offer that seems relevant to the learner’s own life.”
Paths of Learning 2004 — http://www.pathsoflearning.net/articles_Educational_Alternatives.php
There is no better way to learn something than to research, organize and build a personal framework of information, facts, resources, tools and stories around it in a way that makes sense and explains it cohesively.
By actively diving and working through a topic, like a curator or an investigator would do, rather than by passively taking new information in and memorizing it, a student can learn a lot more and much more rapidly than when he is a simple passive subject.
In other words: To learn anything you must dive into it, and new “teachers” (professors included) need to become trusted guides that help students in these explorations in specific areas of interest.
Lifelong learners need to be skilled in finding, filtering, collating, evaluating, collaborating, editing, analyzing and utilizing information from a multitude of sources.
…
Also, the process of accessing, synthesizing and utilizing information is often as important as the product. The skills developed are an essential component of education and life today.”
Sam Gliksman
http://ipadeducators.ning.com/profiles/blogs/supplementing-textbooks
One known key factor about the future is that it is all about rapid change. Little of what we do, expect and consider normal today, will be the same in 10 or 20 years from now. From the way we travel, to the way we work, learn, get healthy, make money and spend our time, huge transformations await human beings on this planet.
New technologies emerge and new approaches, methods, ideas and ways of thinking replace the old ones. Everything is in constant flux and is increasingly based on dealing and effectively managing new information.
Jobs are not characterized anymore by long careers inside a company. As reported in early 2014 by the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the average number of years that a worker stays with a company has gone down to a mere 4.6 years.
For these reasons it appears increasingly evident that those equipped with static skills and know-how learned a long time ago, have little or no chance to make themselves useful and economically sustainable in this fast changing environment.
On the other hand those who develop the ability to keep learning new things, who are able to review, question, update and upgrade their prejudices, know-how, behavior and skills have the greatest chances of being useful participants in the future society as well as of being able to provide useful services / products to others while remaining economically sustainable.
“But more than just practical skills, it’s crucial for students to be able to navigate the digital world around them without fear.
To make sense of the deluge of information online, to learn what to trust, what to dismiss, to be able to find the gold that exists in the infinite number of Google searches. To know how and what to contribute to the online global community, and how to be responsible digital citizens.”
Mindshift, 2012
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/02/three-trends-that-will-shape-the-future-of-curriculum/
This is why, in the future, I believe that the most valuable skills will be those connected with the ability to:
- think through, question
- analyze critically,
- evaluate, compare
- see things from multiple viewpoints / perspective
- vet, verify, validate
- search, investigate, find
- organize, sort
- synthesize
- identify patterns, trends across apparently unconnected realms
- communicate effectively, present, design information
- identify best course of action to achieve any desired goal (strategy).
Critical thinking. This is the most valuable set of mental assets you can start building right now for the future.
“Critical thinking. Students are learning how to effectively find content and to discern reliable sources.
Emphasizing skills over facts. Curriculum incorporates skill-building.”
KQED, 2011
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/02/three-trends-that-will-shape-the-future-of-curriculum/
“By providing this in combination with a means of learner participation in these debates, using Knowledge Neighbourhoods, the learner becomes, not a passive recipient of knowledge, but the sort of critical thinker able to deal with the complexity of the material available in a knowledge-based society.”
Knowledge Media Institute — The Open University
http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2004/10/
Consequences
- Traditional teaching methods lose credibility and with them those individuals and institutions that use them.
- Students and learners of all ages start looking for better and more effective approaches to learning than the traditional, there-is-only-one-truth, teacher-borne, top-down, memorize-rather-than-understand approach.
- For an increasing number of professionals learning now takes places outside traditional schools and universities as individuals have now the resources, awareness and means to pursue their learning path without needing to rely on traditional academia.
- Knowledge, in the form of having memorized lots of specific information items will gradually lose value relative to cognitive skills and critical thinking abilities.
- Learning programs largely based on theory, memorization of facts, will lose competitiveness and students to practical, hands-on, experience-oriented ones.
- Increased demand for cognitive, analytical and problem-solving skills applicable to different areas of interest.
Opportunities
- Curation slowly emerges as an effective, alternative approach to study, learn, research and update existing information on any topic, as well as to transform the role of the student into one of explorer-investigator and the one of the teacher into one of guide-facilitator.
- As we improve our education system and we increasingly direct it not to focus on memorizing facts, but on collaborating with others in the process of sense-making by researching, vetting, organizing and adding value to meaningful collections, then, for the first time in history, we can all participate in improving, extending and enriching our overall knowledge.
- Opportunities exists for startups, entrepreneurs and organizations interested in creating learning programs that help students develop cognitive, critical thinking skills.
- Teachers, professors and students adopt content curation practices to learn topics they are interested in.
See: Students becoming curators of information — Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, 2011
Resources
- Do Schools Kill Creativity?
TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson - Crap Detection Resources & Tools Directory
curated by Howard Rheingold and Robin Good
Selected books by critics of mainstream schooling and traditional teaching methods:
- Do Schools Kill Creativity?
TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson - Deschooling society by Ivan Illich
- Compulsory Miseducation and the Community of Scholars
by Paul Goodman - The Lives of Children by George Dennison,
- Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
- How Children Learn by John Holt
- How Children Fail by John Holt
Thank you for reading.
I am Robin Good, an independent author / publisher with a terminal addiction: help others effectively communicate, learn and market their ideas by exploring new ethical venues, innovative strategies and uncharted territories outside the mainstream.
Discover more about curation right here:
https://medium.com/content-curation-official-guide
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