What do you believe is the major product of schools? My opinion is to achieve the ability and desire of students to learn new things through educational activities. What are your thoughts?
I loved this post from Seth Godin’s blog:
The problem with complaining about the system
…is that the system can’t hear you. Only people can.
And the problem is that people in the system are too often swayed to believe that they have no power over the system, that they are merely victims of it, pawns, cogs in a machine bigger than themselves. That says it all, doesn’t it?
Alas, when the system can’t hear you, and those who can believe they have no power, nothing improves.
Systems don’t mistreat us, misrepresent us, waste our resources, govern poorly, support an unfair status quo and screw things up–people do.
If we care enough, we can make it change.
What does Bill Gates think? Learning Skills: Facts Bill Gates Doesn’t Understand About Education
The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor, and it isn’t optional.
-Clay Shirky
As Clay describes the digital internet age, it is far from minor and not optional. Right on the mark isn’t it? This description is particularly relevant to the need for continuous learning.
The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. EVERY TWO YEARS. Amazing, isn’t it?
The top 10 jobs that were in demand in 2013 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that don’t yet exist. All this to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. Scary, isn’t it?
For students starting a four-year technical or college degree, one-half of what they will learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. We are living in exponential times, aren’t we? For more background see Shift Happens 2013.
What is your choice for the top learning issue of the day? Continuous learning is our choice. Taught in schools? We have not found many that are changing their learning and education strategy based on this environment. In fact, most seem to be hunkering down even more into the past. We were very surprised by this finding, how about you?
In earlier times, perhaps several generations or so ago, our great grandparents and their parents faced an entirely different problem of learning. In their environment, both generations shared the same problems and the same solutions. Learning in this environment was a lot simpler. It was simply a matter of transferring information (facts) from the older generation to the newer one.
Enter the industrial age where the world had begun to change very rapidly and grow in complexity. Old solutions, old facts, were no longer enough. Learning needed to change to keep up, switching from learning old information to discovering and understanding new information and solutions. A paradigm shift had begun. No longer dumping facts into a learner’s memory was going to be adequate.
In the information and internet ages, learning problems have gotten much worse. As we said earlier, the amount of new technical information is doubling every two years … doubling. We are living in exponential times.
So how do we improve our ability for continuous learning in such a fast-changing and complex environment? We have defined ten ways we believe are essential to achieving this goal.
Let’s discuss each of these:
Learn by doing
Most of what we know, we didn’t learn in school. We learned it in the real world, actually doing, not reading or listening about doing. Confucius once said:
I hear I forget. I see I remember. I do, I understand.
He appreciated that being a creator was the best way to learn. Make your learning be active learning and be creators as often as possible. And learn as many new things as possible. That means making your work environment an environment of change. Rotate into new jobs every 18 to 24 months (note that new jobs don’t necessarily mean new employers). We believe this is the most critical of the ten ways to improve your learning.
Educational activities … observe and reflect
By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection on what we observe, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Give students more opportunities to increase their ability to connect the dots around them.
Related post: Learning From Pet Dog Personality Traits
Present Novelty
Our brains pay more attention to things in the environment that are new to our experience. So, seek out as many new experiences to try as you can handle and help students become an explorer. Continuously expand their boundaries of new experiences …include some far out things in different fields. Continuously practice connecting the dots of experiences.
Don’t fear failure
Students need to be learners that ask hard questions and explore what might work and what won’t. As a learner, we need to accept failure so we can use the often messy trial and error. Make failures and mistakes as learning sources (and the mistakes and failures need not be yours).
Related post: How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?
Activity for students … develop curiosity
Continually get students to think about what they don’t know, don’t be afraid of confusing student learning and evoking tough questions. You can develop curiosity. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning.
Curiosity must come first. Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build students’ skill of curiosity … It is a necessity for good learning.
Fun learning activities for adults … practice imagination
Albert Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.
He understood the complexities of the world today required imagination for the discovery of new ideas and solutions. Imagination requires lots of practice; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So start working on this skill to add it to improving student learning.
Related post: Albert Einstein Facts and Wisdom
Employ emotion
We as learners respond to things around ourselves that elicit emotion. Put emotional stories to work to create a stimulus-response learning process. Listen to inspirational and emotional stories and use them as experiential learning in the classroom.
Embrace change and contrast
Students learn new things best when they are in contrast to other information in the environment or to things that are in contrast to previous experiences.
To improve learning, work on the experience of change … have students study trends and study changes going on around them. Get them to step out into the unknown as often as they can.
Understand the meaning
In learning, students tend to respond best when they determine things that are most meaningful. Find the meanings that provide that which motivates us to dig deeper.
Connect and collaborate
Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Have students find some interesting online connections who share like goals, and have them try a collaboration project or two.
Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.
A favorite expert on learning
One of our favorite authors on the subject of schools and learning is Marion Brady … you can find most of his work on his website.
I’ll start by affirming what he believes most thoughtful educators take for granted:
The main aim of schooling is to model or explain reality better. As you read, don’t lose sight of that. The aim of schooling isn’t to teach math, science, language arts, and other school subjects better, but to expand our understanding of reality.
Let me say this again … the main aim of schooling is to expand our understanding of reality.
BUCKMINSTER Fuller once said, “American education has developed in such a way it will be the undoing of the society.” Reading those words today, many may nod in agreement.
Few, however, are likely to give the same reason as Fuller did for so bleak a prediction.
Fuller was an inventive genius, but he was also a college professor, cartographer, philosopher, naval officer, mathematician, poet, researcher, cosmologist, industrialist, engineer, environmentalist, advisor to business and government, holder of 25 patents, author of 28 books, and recipient of 47 honorary degrees.
He aired his views on American education, including the judgment Brady quoted above, in the late 1980s in a speech delivered to a group that included college presidents.
“What you fellows in the universities do,” he continued, “is make all the bright students into experts in something. That has some usefulness, but the trouble is it leaves the ones with mediocre minds and the dunderheads to become generalists, who must serve as college presidents … and presidents of the United States.”
Generalists – people who strive to see the “big picture” – don’t get much respect in America. There is no listing for “Generalists” in the Yellow Pages, no places are reserved for them on the faculties of high schools and colleges, and no employment ads seek applications from them.
And what is the big picture today? Brady would include intensifying clashes on the “fault lines” between religions, societies, and civilizations; continuing threats of terrorism; a shrinking middle class and a widening gap between rich and poor; the confusion of national power with national greatness; dishonesty in boardrooms; violence accepted as entertainment; vast wealth plowed into no-return-on-investment armament and conflict; increasing environmental degradation; and lobbyist-dominated legislatures.
He goes on to state that these related, big-picture issues are parts of a systemically integrated whole – a whole that the education establishment is not addressing. We send our graduates off with expertise in technology, banking, politics, medicine, law, and myriad other fields, staking our collective fate on their ability to manage crises as they pop up. But the old problems intensify and are joined by new ones.
None of these actions do the job that needs doing. All these approaches to broadening students’ ability to deal with reality assume that the traditional academic disciplines are the basic organizers of knowledge and that the main task of educating is to introduce those disciplines to students. Wrong he states. The main task of educating is to help students make more sense of the world, themselves, and others.
The bottom line
