One of the more thought-provoking articles I’ve read recently is from Terry Heick, and encourages us to question how we, as educators, think about learners and what we are doing with them – https://www.teachthought.com/education/the-most-fundamental-idea-in-public-education/
The pandemic hasn’t necessarily started this questioning process, but it’s certainly given us a timely opportunity to challenge the status quo in a positive way. I agree that we are “in a bit of a funk” with how we perceive who we are, what we do, whether we are producing outputs or outcomes, how all this should be measured, and who by. There is also the thorny issue of who we are doing it for. I once witnessed the frustration experienced by a teaching colleague and a marketing professional, arguing over whether our primary purpose as educators was to serve John Q. Student or Eloise P. Employer. Each was convinced they were fundamentally right and pretty much unprepared to accept the other might have been right as well. What disappointed me was that both of them had elements of rightness to their arguments – neither of them needed to be wrong for the other to be right.
What kind of thinking might the article title lead us to? Perhaps your thinking might be something like mine:
** Learners are not products in the same way as tangible things that we buy from stores – we need to move our thinking from the focus on those things to accept a less tangible combination of mental and spiritual outcomes demonstrated by the ways in which learners are able to relate to and collaborate with others.
** Educators don’t produce in the same way that, say, somebody in a factory produces tangible objects. I think of myself more as a semi-autonomous (and I can push where that autonomous boundary is) part of an infrastructure that should be geared around facilitating learners developing their ability to think and solve problems collaboratively.
** Education isn’t a possession in the same way as the goods we buy from the shops. It is a “public good”. Knowledge and experience are the individual possessions of the people who have them, and cannot be taken away from them. Education I see as being the ways in which learners connect their individual knowledge and experiences for a collective and positive collaborative result – something that is bigger than just them.
** It’s all a matter of membership in the “learning and using” experience. Problem solving is best achieved on a collaborative basis – more brains and viewpoints applied to a problem are likely to happen when the various stakeholders in the learning processes and experience perceive themselves as members of an organisation with shared purpose, no matter their individual roles in that organisation.
**All the parts are interdependent – I learn and draw inspiration from my learners in the same space where I hope they are gaining these things from the ways I work to support them. Take any one part out – and that might be simply somebody choosing to not engage or not fully engage with the learning and experience processes – and each part of the whole is somehow diminished.
In considering what 21st century vocational learning experiences could look like, we could start from the viewpoint that the current system is fundamentally and fatally broken. It is misaligned with outcomes that are desirable for our current environment, and for what we think out future environment might look like. This may be because relationships have become disconnected, or because some of the ideas they connect are no longer appropriate, or because parts of the learning environment have been “adjusted” so many times that they are not capable of any further modification. Alternatively, we could consider any perceived gap between current reality and desirable future reality more positively – that (in New Zealand) the formation and evolution of Te Pūkenga gifts us the empowering opportunity to think past the old paradigms and the infrastructure they created; to create learning experiences that better connected the needs and wants of multiple stakeholder groups in an environment that is more dynamic and uncertain than anything any of us have had to deal with in our own experience.
In a system that’s traditionally been focused on individual achievement – first past the post – it’s almost inevitable that weaker learners – judged by performance against arbitrary academic criteria – will get left behind. To be fair, there are many fine, extremely dedicated educators in all parts of the system who work to try to ensure those weaker learners are not “selected out” because of a system that is not geared to recognise or reward their different learning approaches. That seriously calls into question what our bottom line should be, if we accept that education is a social good, where financial. return on assets employed is not the only benchmark against which delivery and outcomes should be measured. The bottom line might be more appropriately measured as the ability of players in the system – including those engaged in formal learning, those engaged in delivering those learning experiences, and those on the receiving ends of practical project outcomes -to engage collaboratively to address shared problems.
This line of thinking leads inevitably to the question of just how much of future learning opportunities can be genuinely co-created. Let’s accept – for now – that the overall curriculum is still going to be centrally mandated (and probably created as well). When that includes qualification and course outcome statements to the effect that learners will demonstrate the ability to work collaboratively and to solve complex problems, why are we still delivering qualifications, and courses within them, where significant opportunities to develop and practice real collaborative skills are either rejected outright or confined to the traditional capstone course? If the opportunities to meaningfully be collaborative, including through co-creation of course and assessment structures are restricted – at best – to the capstone as the end of the formal learning experience, we are doing our learners a significant disservice.
Why do we assume that learners are incapable of co-creating a learning and assessment process that meets their individual learning needs within the wider parameters of the curriculum or course outcomes? Are we so hung up on the hierarchical structures of the past that we are unwilling to flatten the hierarchy into something that is much more active as opposed to directive/reactive? If the answer is that nothing in their previous formal learning, or our own experience as educators, has prepared anybody for this, that’s insufficient reason for simply accepting that it can’t be done.
Are we accepting the doctrine of survival of the fittest as the natural order of things? If we tell learners that we expect them to work collaboratively – because that ability is something that employers prize when choosing new employees – but then assess them individually, how are they to make sense of this dichotomy? We might encourage discussing ideas as part of assessment work, but then we expect totally different individual pieces of work to be submitted. It’s as though we are determined to undervalue what is created collaboratively.
Why do we assume – almost ritualistically – that some learners are always going to game the system, and that collaborative learning merely increases the opportunities for collusion to subvert the qualification or course outcomes? Surely a co-creation approach can also facilitate a learning experience design that disincentivises cheating as part of a collaborative ethos.
How do we know that learners who may not perform at the highest level in an individual setting are incapable of reaching that level in a collaborative environment? If their performance suddenly goes up a couple of notches, that doesn’t automatically mean they found some people who are prepared to carry them. It could be that they are simply much more comfortable in a collaborative situation, and that this brings out a side to them that solo working isn’t going to do. This is a discovery we should be celebrating rather than being deeply suspicious of.
If we accept that the component courses of a qualification form a coherent whole skill and knowledge set, how confident can we be that learners have made the appropriate connections between the content of different courses by the time they graduate? The traditional approach is that assessments within a single course – other than in a capstone project – are connected only to content within that one course. Even assumed prior knowledge/learning typically applies within a particular subject area rather than across different areas. Connections between subject areas receive very little attention. If the capstone project can integrate material from different subject areas at a complex level, our curriculum-driven attachment to learning in silos when there are logical connections between subject areas should be challenged. Cross-subject area connections should be made at all levels so learners develop an appreciation of what they are learning as part of something holistic, where nothing exists in isolation from everything else.
Reflection is a skill that often seems to be assumed because it appears in relatively few course outcome lists. Unless, however, it is both a trained rather than assumed skill and deliberately included across all learning outcomes for a course or for a whole qualification, it is unlikely to be actively practiced by many learners. This means much valuable learning at a personal level is lost because there is nothing that formally assesses how it was done and what came out of it. An important part of reflection is the feedback given and received within the collaborative team. Again, the ability to provide meaningful and constructive feedback is something that should be a trained skill rather than an assumed one, so its development can be monitored and encouraged.
Teams are not, however, without their drawbacks, so I’m not putting them forward as some sort of “magic answer” that only has an upside. My practical experience tells me that members don’t always do the things they should. Sometimes energy is poured into starting the task quickly at the expense of planning it well – even in terms of planning how the team itself will operate. If this happens in a trimester-long capstone project, that may leave enough time – depending on when and how the problems become apparent – to resolve issues and extract the maximum valuable learning from them. Working on a project that is over an even longer duration, and where the different parts are more obviously and deliberately connected, allows more opportunities for people to grow at different rates, to practice effective collaboration skills and to refine them.
The challenge ahead of us now is to do more than think about students and education. We have the opportunity to create learning experiences in ways that focus more on the growth of the individual through collaboration and co-creation rather than through first past the post competition. Now is the time for us to be bold and do more than talk. Now is the time for us to create and implement a learning and assessment environment that develops all-round performers through a process where learners have a genuine and very personal connection to, and ownership of, the whole learning experience.
Rob Nelson Education 