As Yuval Noah Harari stated in his book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, one of the big changes that are needed involves what we teach in schools. While reading, writing and arithmetic adequately prepared children to work in the industrial era, in the technological era vastly different skills, are needed. We will be moving away from “right” and “wrong” answers, moving toward probabilities and likelihoods instead. Workers of the future will need to seek out unique ways of solving problems and be able to justify those solutions to others. The skills Harari says should be taught include:
- Critical Thinking
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Communication
The question now becomes “how do we pivot?” Our education system has many years of
experience in the old way of thinking.
It’s chock full of lesson plans, tests, curricula, and teachers that are
familiar with the 10-month timeframe to “teach” what is needed for the students
to move to the next step in the process.
And when that process is done, out pops a unit of labor. But that unit of labor needs to go into the
world and find a way to fit in. And if
it can’t it has other choices to make.
Let’s start with the assumption that children want to grow
up to contribute to society. To do that
they will need to provide skills that society values (at least part of the
society).
I believe the first step is to move from Students to
Learners. Students are people that
attend educational institutions with Teachers.
While Learners are people trying to gain knowledge or skill by studying
or practicing. Do you notice the slight
difference there?
Students Learners
>Educational
setting >Anywhere
>Have
teachers >Are
responsible for their own education
What would that mean for Teachers?
Teachers need to become the coaches for the Learners. They need to assist the Learners in
identifying their goals and assist them in reaching those goals. One problem with this scenario is each Learner will have different goals and timeframes. While it’s easy for an Educational System to
say Student A is going to be in Math from 8:00AM to 8:45AM, 4-days per week,
one of the keys to Learning is obtaining the knowledge when and where it is
needed. Is a Teacher supposed to be
available at 10:45PM if that is when the Learner needs assistance?
I would argue that a key would be for the early part of
education to involve allowing Learners to struggle. Developing the muscle of grit (resilience)
early in life goes a long way toward creating successful Learners. If Learners get stuck in an issue and need
help, they need to be able to try and figure it out on their own. Maybe it involves contacting peers, checking
online for solutions, or actually sitting in the discomfort and allowing their
minds to work on the problem. I have
often been working on a crossword puzzle, getting stuck on a clue, leaving it
for a while, and coming back to have the answer come easily.
Once we are able to “teach” Learners how to sit in the
discomfort of not knowing or use other resources to answer their own
questions, the next step will be to bring those skills to solving
problems. How do we do that?
My first thought would be to ask a simple question: “Who
were all the people involved in making your last meal?”
This would get us into the 4-C’s right away. I think back to the Ted Talk from A. J.
Jacobs wanted to thank everyone involved in creating his morning cup of
coffee. He started with the barista,
went to the roaster, the farmer, the trucker, etc. and you can see that none of
these people would be able to do their job without the other people. Applying that to the last meal would allow the
teacher to coach the Learner to think about other things that had to happen as
well.
Critical Thinking – While we might just think that a parent cooked the meal, coaching could push the Learner to think about
- how the parent got the food to be able to cook
- how the stove became hot
- where the pans came from
- where the stove came from
I think you can see where this is going. And each of those bullets above can be used
to introduce new topics. Such as, how
does heat transfer from the stove to the pan?
Why doesn’t the stove get colder because we put cold food in the pan?
Creativity – By asking these questions, the teacher
can push the Learner to come up with creative solutions. They can ask where would you find similar
things happening? Where are things
different? For instance, let’s say we
add electricity to a toaster oven. The
food inside gets hot. But we also add
electricity to a refrigerator and the food gets cold. Why do we have such different results from
the same process?
Collaboration – When it comes to producing the meal,
there are several opportunities to talk about collaboration. One would be just the collaboration of all
the entities involved in creating the various items involved. Then, how they have to work together to get
the goods to the stores. Next, how we
all agree on this story of money (that could be a whole semester right there!).
And to take this to a meta-level, having the Learners work
together to come up with the ideas also allows them opportunities to
collaborate themselves. They can
determine how they are impacted by working with others. Did they see things differently by getting
another’s perspective? How were they
working together as a group to put their ideas out there?
Communication – The final part of the lesson would be
around how to get their points across to others. What seemed to work? What did not work? Whose ideas were you open to? Why did their opinion sway you? Why did other opinions not sway you?
This model would allow for many of the other subjects
currently taught to be incorporated into the lessons as well. There are plenty of areas where science,
math, economics, social science, history, geography, etc. can be added to the
discussions to enrich the lessons being learned. The key to this would be in the teachers
being flexible in their approach to the lessons and adroitly identifying the
“learning moments” in each meeting to ensure that they are not lost. That will be difficult when the existing
teachers have been raised in a system that used “sage on the stage”
methods. However, there are many great
teachers out there that would love to get away from the “teaching to the test”
mentalities that some education systems demand.
