Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Thinking about new schools

Thinking about new schools

Published by Wesley Fryer in assessment, creativity, economics, edtech, literacy, schoolreform on November 14th, 2006

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

In his article (linked on the Creativity Exchange) “Beyond Schools: A New Foundation for Education in the 21st Century” (PDF) Gary L. Thompson addresses several key questions and issues about reinventing education for our new millenium:

If the World is Flat, then how do we Flatten Education?
Education as [a] Pipeline Rather Than [a] Linear Progression of Grades
School of One & The 21 Century Library Card
Education and Talent are Fundamental Components of Economic Development

I found the following statements in Gary’s article particularly compelling:

As a state, we [Texans] have just successfully completed an important special session on school finance, but as we think about funding, we need to acknowledge that in the end, we are funding education and not schools. These two starting points yield very different results. In the end, education is not about buildings, structures or institutions; it is about learning.

Gary is absolutely right about this. Too often when we discuss education and particularly the politics and budgets which govern much of education, the focus is parochial and institution-based. We need a broader dialog and focus, which recognizes that the “goods” produced through the educational systems transcend individual organizations and limited group interests. A goal of a factionalized educational system is ostensibly to produce this greater common good, similar to what James Madison discussed in Federalist 10 concerning U.S. Constitutional government. Unfortunately as we know, the realities of politics at the federal level and in education often seem to fall short of these ideals. Those failures should not deter us, however, from striving to continually improve reality and envision a better system. Often I think the people within our systems have greater capacities for moral and effective behavior than they sometimes demonstrate. Change is therefore as much an issue of leadership and vision as it is institutional reform.

On the subject of factory-model thinking in education, Gary observes:

Our education system has built a network of schools that is focused on buildings, classrooms, geographic boundaries and transportation requirements and this system also has inherent in it a network of classrooms that constrains the value of a teacher to the number of students in their classroom at any one time. It forces a duplication of spending, as it replicates everything from football fields to library materials to the administration needed to effectively orchestrate the education enterprise.

These orientations are now intrinsic to our educational enterprise (in most cases) at both the K-12 and the higher education levels. This strikes me as unfortunate in the context of blending learning, which is a learning environment and instructional pedagogy for which I strongly advocate. Everyone cannot be a world-class lecturer on every topic. Since the flat world allows us to bring in video clips / podcasts / presentations from others around the planet, it is more cost effective than ever to expand our notions of curricula and “content expert” beyond the traditional ideas with which most learners (students and teachers) are intimately familiar. Changing these ideas truly is more of an issue of “mindware” rather than hardware, however, as I discussed last week in my final presentation at HLA 2006.

On the subject of educational “gaps” Gary writes:

The biggest gap between college and kids is the gap between dreams and opportunity. The sooner we can create relationships between colleges, universities, professors, counselors and kids, the sooner the gaps begin to close. A new web of learning can be formed, and relationships can be built. A university or community college can look out into the state and see the future, the future students that will soon walk their campuses and inhabit their classrooms. With all of the privacy and security that our new IT systems can create, profiles can be shared, and if the relationship is the right one, then identities can be revealed. The whole notion of a college application begins to evaporate, because the relationship between university and kid starts a whole lot sooner than a transcript and an application.

I agree that we need to understand K-16 education as a connected continuum, but I think our focus needs to extend even beyond the college level to the workplace. The goal of the educational system should not be merely to populate college attendance and bursar rolls with lots of students, but to infuse our society with capable, literate, creative, bold and visionary graduates who have the skills and motivation to constructively contribute to our society and economy. (Gary does pick up this thread of connecting to the workforce in his paper too.)

Gary’s ideas about a “21st Century library card” are interesting, but I think we need to be wary of proposals which would impose a top-down, technocratic and centrally managed system of information monitoring and control. Similar to the way we see folksonomies of information emerging organically using different web 2.0 tools and technologies, I think we should work toward more decentralized mechanisms for idea authoring and sharing that are linked to particular people. In the context of K-12 education, where privacy and safety issues are extremely important, this is perhaps more difficult than for higher education. The idea is still workable, however. At the end of one phase of “the educational pipeline,” learners should have at their fingertips a digital portfolio reflecting their ongoing work and thinking about a variety of topics. As students work in the digital environment, I think they should be encouraged to leave “digital ruts” in the hillsides of learning on their educational journeys which can be seen and even followed by subsequent explorers. This is a rich metaphor that I hope to explore in greater depth (perhaps even with a video podcast) at a later date.

Gary’s metaphor of the Titanic is a sobering one to consider in the context of educational reform:

If we canâ€™t let go of our current notions of education, we are simply rearranging the proverbial chairs on the Titanic. We must change the course of the ship and avoid the icebergs.

There are some in the educational political arena who envision a day when our current educational system will implode if it does not change and adapt to meet new demands of the dynamic environment outside our schools. I am not a doomsday advocate at this point, but I do think we should all feel a strong imperative to improve our schools and “think differently” when it comes to education. As I’ve written and said many times before, we don’t just need digital worksheets imposed on a traditional system of education. What we need are innovative and open strategies which empower learners of all ages, which de-regulate the educational enterprise and inspire learning with creative carrots rather than flogging the inmates with bigger and longer sticks.

Technorati Tags: assessment, creativity, education