Tonight I had dinner with Joe, Savi, Mere, and unfortunately pontificated – a bit – on the status of education. They found it poignant. I thought to summarize my statements while I still have them. Mainly they fall into two categories:
- We teach students knowledge, not how to gain knowledge. We can do both.
- Our system is not based on what we know about human motivation, notably that people are motivated by:
- Competency,
- Autonomy, and
- Relatedness.
Given what we know about human motivation, it should be a surprise to no one by now that we see a drop off in student engagement at the middle school level. Research clearly shows that, as students increasingly see the dissonance between their values and interests as emerging individuals and the school system, students disengage. Those who have individuals in their lives enforcing relatedness between their family or social values and success in school are already okay, we don’t need to worry about those kids as much as others. We need to focus on making a compelling argument to the children who are raised in homes with parents who also have complicated relationships with formal educational systems. And they have a compelling counter argument – what was taught in schools were then, and are increasingly now, irrelevant to their perceptions of success. We need designs for learning that allow all children to develop and explore their own personal interests and passions, within the school structure. The school structure needs to be flexible enough to recognize and award students while following their passions.
Students need guiding practice to learn how to identify and define a learning target, design a pathway towards learning that target, and develop a method by which the student will demonstrate their competency over the learning target. Heretofore we’ve designed schools with the assumption that we could tell kids all which was worth knowing – that’s not the case anymore. Of course, all children should leave schools with a basic level of competency over civic engagement, numeracy and literacy in the dominant language(s) of their personal contexts. That given, we’re no longer in a position to assume that what we teach children today can apply to their lives tomorrow. The null or hidden curriculum of schools no longer applies. That is, the idea if students simply learn to participate in the game of schooling – a game bounded by rules, well-defined objectives, and effective strategies – that they will be a successful and contributing adult in society. No, now students need practice learning. That is, students need practice learning the process of learning. Some may argue that humans are naturally inquisitive, that it is the system of schooling itself that trains students out of the ability to learn. To some extent, I may agree.
Nonetheless, I believe that the new and emerging role of teachers and of schooling may well be to serve dual roles: 1) to ensure students achieve the basic skills necessary to engage in civic and personally-defined important discourse and, 2) to achieve a level of proficiency over learning.
What do I mean when I talk about proficiency over learning? I will draw a short contrast. Consider a generally shared impression about classic schooling in the 19th and 20th century – we have an authoritarian school teacher who owns knowledge and designs a process through which said knowledge is imparted upon students, who are – by the way – passive agents in learning. Their job is to absorb the knowledge and produce some sort of representation of said knowledge that is deemed sufficient by the teacher. In this system, the student’s job is to absorb knowledge and demonstrate competency of the knowledge back to the teacher when requested.
What happens, however, when students enter an age were facts they may learn in elementary school may well be refuted and irrelevant by the time these facts are to be employed in adulthood? A question of absurdity you might argue, but it’s the state of our existence as a species. It is imperative, therefore, in my mind, to prepare learners to learn. We must and therefore will prepare all children to learn how to learn. We will do this in the same way we’ve been teaching students for a century – by applying base principals of cognition first outlined by Vygotsky and other learning theorists.
We will develop ways to assess and document students’ current capacity to learn. We will create school systems that identify and develop students’ innate human interests and strengths, work within their ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) to help them – students – to identify a pathway and define a process towards gaining proficiency over their interest(s), and work with them to enter and eventually contribute to the discourse communities that are relevant to their interests.
To me, this is the necessary future of schooling. We will ensure that all students have the basic skills required to function in civic, personal, and academic life. Concurrently, we will work with students to identify and pursue their interests in increasingly meaningful ways while teaching them effective methods to identify interests, learn new things, and enter discourse and communities of practice.
By doing so we will increase engagement and achievement for all students. We will satisfy basic human needs for a sense of competency, relatedness, and autonomy. Students will experience a sense of purpose and control over their own learning while engaging in meaningful contributions to discourse communities.
Works Referenced
Collins, A., & Halverson, R. (2009). Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology. New York: Teachers College Press.
Deci, E. L., Ryan, R. M., & Koestner, R. (1999). A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627
Gee, J. (2007). Affinity Spaces: From Age of Mythology to Today’s Schools. In Good video games+ good learning: Collected essays … (pp. 87–103). Retrieved from http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&btnG=Search&q=intitle:AFFINITY+SPACES:+FROM+AGE+OF+MYTHOLOGY+TO+TODAY?S+SCHOOLS#0
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.