Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash

Bringing knowledge to the forefront

There is a huge debate about “which is the best” focus for learning and pedagogy for the 21st-century raging in education circles at the moment!

What’s the most important: content, skills or character attributes, dispositions or attitudes? Should we, as teachers, be sages, guides or mentors? Which pedagogy should we use: direct instruction, collaborative project based stuff or personal inquiry? And then the biggie: screentime vs paper (digital/analogue) with respect to well-being…

The thing is… I believe this sets us up for a false trichotomy!

It seems that over the last 15 years that educators have been calling for education to focus on future focussed skills such as “learning to learn” etc. This is because knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate. Futurists are predicting that much of the content learned over a three-year degree at university will be “out of date” by the time students graduate. So, if we teach how to learn then students of the future will have the skills to stay current. To combat this big money is being invested in technology to deliver “micro-credentials”. In New Zealand, Otago Polytechnic has been working furiously on edubits.nz to provide this service. Another really interesting New Zealand initiative is NZ Talent. They are a group of top antipodean CEOs who have written an “open letter to New Zealand”. It’s worth a read, but if you don’t have the time here’s a quote from from Craig Hudson (XERO) which summarises their approach to recruitment:

"It's about aptitude and attitude rather than qualification."
— Craig Hudson (Xero), NewsTalk ZB

Social media is becoming more and more important in this future focus. For example, LinkedIn, the social media site which connects us in business and the workplace emphasises the creating of personal learning networks which keeps people connected and learning professional skills. (These micro skills are curated on your profile and shared with future employees). To develop these even further, in the past season, they’ve introduced LinkedIn Learning — a section of their site for professional development. (LinkedIn has even bought SlideShare — the world’s leading presentation sharing platform to further this…)

And now comes the BIG BUT…

If we argue for skills over the content we actually create a problem 20 years down the line. Why? Because content knowledge is what we think with. The brain grows when we think about content — bits of essential content are the building block for understanding. If we stop teaching “key content” students can’t think deeply! And this is deeply problematic. This is increasingly obvious to me in teaching English when ‘skilled’ students arrive in my class who can’t spell, have a low vocabulary score and don’t know how to punctuate a sentence. And frankly, it gets me worried! It’s all very well leading our classrooms in inquiry, but students don’t know what they don’t know so they can’t inquire when they have no context or framing knowledge to base their curiosity on. For example, when we “do speeches”I’ve noticed, the hardest part is for the students to choose their topic — they have no idea what to focus on because they are lost in a world of skills (and dare I say… gaming (ok — this is a bit cheeky!)).

So, my current mantra is: hold on to the “old” and reach for the “new”. We NEED to do both! We need to instruct and we need to coach. We need to teach key content as subject matter experts AND we need to lead skill based inquiry as coaches.

The job description just widened!

Kia kaha.