Rethinking Schools and Renewing Energy for Learning

Research, Principles and Practice

Kris Van den Branden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351044295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Rethinking Schools and Renewing Energy for Learning presents a comprehensive view on the major challenges educators face in the 21st century, and the ways in which schools can make a difference. It describes key principles that can serve as guidelines for tackling those challenges in an effective and manageable way, looking both at what children should learn, and what they want to learn.

Drawing on research, policy-related literature, and a wide range of practice-based examples, the book addresses various topics, such as goals, pedagogy, assessment, equity, policy, and the role of technology in learning. The book suggests that schools can be as rewarding and fulfilling as they have been in the past and gives examples of how this can be accomplished.

Rethinking Schools and Renewing Energy for Learning will be of great interest to academics, postgraduate students, teacher educators, and scholars in the field of education, specifically interested in primary education, secondary education, teacher education, and education policy.

1
Major challenges for education in the 21st century

Introduction

In 2015 the British Innovation Unit published a paper called “10 ideas for 21st century education”.¹ The authors claim that their ideas will make education more powerful, not only in terms of preparing young people for work and life in the 21st century, but also in keeping them more engaged at school:

1. Open up lessons: Rethink rigid timetables built around fixed 45–60-minute lesson periods. Work with shorter and longer periods, depending on learning objectives and the students’ needs.
2. Think outside the classroom box: Rethink the infrastructure of the traditional classroom in which students sit in rows at individual desks, facing the teacher. Instead, create flexible learning zones for discussion, experimentation, and student research.
3. Get personal: Do not expect all students of the same class to learn the same thing, at the same pace, and in the same way. Personalize education by giving students more opportunities to self-regulate their learning and pursue their own interests, providing them with individual feedback and allowing them to learn at their own pace.
4. Tap into students’ digital expertise: Allow and encourage students to use technology in the classroom to showcase their work, do research, react to the lesson content, and communicate with other students, including those in other schools and countries.
5. Get real with projects: Give students more opportunities to engage in projects that invite them to carry out research across subject boundaries, create high-quality output, and present their work to their peers, teachers, parents, and the outside world.
6. Expect (and help) students to be teachers: Capitalize on students’ competence to help, assist, tutor, and instruct their peers. Allow them to give shape to their own education and learning process.
7. Help (and expect) teachers to be students: Give teachers rich opportunities to develop their professional expertise and to learn more about learning themselves. If the best teachers are those who lead by example, the most inspiring teachers are those who remain passionate about learning and keep on learning themselves.
8. Measure what matters: Focus assessment on the competences that are truly important for young people to acquire in the 21st century. Rather than testing whether students can memorize and recall facts, schools should measure higher-order thinking skills, problem-solving skills, cooperative skills, and creativity. Furthermore, assessment should be continuous and result in feedback.
9. Work with families, not just children: Build bridges between schools and families. Engage parents to participate in school life and co-construct the curriculum or school policy. Help parents, especially socially disadvantaged parents, to support their children’s development. Use modern technology and social media to foster school communities and to engage in rich and continuous dialogue with all parents.
10. Power to the student: Give students the opportunity to have a say in matters that affect them. Promote true student participation to make learners feel more valued and take ownership of their learning. Help them develop citizenship skills, social responsibility, and intercultural sensitivity.

The paper published by the British Innovation Unit is one of the many publications in which far-reaching ideas for educational change in the 21st century are presented. During the past two decades, international organizations, such as OECD, the United Nations, and the European Union, have issued resolutions and policy papers on educational reform.² A host of national governments and education boards have issued new national curricula or have begun new rounds of curriculum reform.³ Education experts and researchers have published volumes, articles, mission statements and research papers in which the strong need for educational innovation is advocated.⁴

Most of those publications have met with enthusiasm on the one hand, and strong resistance on the other. The latter should not come as a surprise. According to the authors of the British Innovation Unit paper, this is because most adults have strong assumptions about education. Many are still convinced that students should sit in rows behind a desk, facing the teacher; Lessons should last about an hour and students should spend most of their time listening to the teacher. Such notions are deeply ingrained in many people’s minds, because this is the kind of education they experienced themselves when they were young, as a result of which they have come to believe that this is what education should look like: Any change will inevitably lead to the loss of quality.

In fact, not only adult laymen, but also some educational experts and researchers have expressed their doubts about the sense of urgency with which change in education is advocated and the kinds of reform that are proposed.⁵ Their main comments can be summed up as follows:

• Does education really need to change? Is there any compelling evidence that things are going wrong? As a matter of fact, the available empirical data⁶ provides strong indications that the world is more educated than ever before. The average number of years young people spend at school is much higher than in the 20th century. Around 85% of young adults (aged 25 to 34) have attained upper secondary education. By 2010, the average worker in Bangladesh had completed more years of schooling than the typical worker in France in 1975. The number of students graduating from tertiary education also keeps on rising. On average and on a global scale, literacy rates have never been so high. Clearly, these observations show that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the way education is organized. So who needs reform?
• Should the economy drive educational innovation? The main reasons why education allegedly needs to change are of an economic kind. Many of the so-called much-needed innovative practices, such as the integration of modern technology in education, the stronger emphasis on maths and science education, and the increased use of cooperative learning, are primarily dictated by employers and multinational companies who need a particular kind of workforce to maximize their profits. But education involves much more than preparing young people for jobs. It should foster students’ overall personal and cultural development.
• What on earth is so “21st century” about 21st-century education? Didn’t students need to develop higher-order thinking skills in the 20th century? Didn’t students in ancient times need to learn to work together, solve problems and become literate as well?
• Will the innovations that are put forward truly raise the effectiveness of education? Many of the innovative practices that are proposed involve project-based, inductive, learner-centred types of education that progressive pedagogues have been advocating for ages, but which empirical research shows are less effective than direct instruction and teacher-led instruction. So what guarantees do we have that the quality of education will improve by putting all those wild ideas into practice?
• Will the teacher become obsolete? Many of the 21st-century innovations seem to hinge on an uncontested belief in the added value of modern technology. Blended learning, flipped classrooms, MOOGS, and internet fora are claimed to enhance student motivation and learning, facilitate differentiation between learners, and respond to the personal needs of individual learners in unprecedented ways. So, why then do some researchers persist that teachers make the greatest difference?

In this book, I will address all of these questions and comments and use the available research into learning and instruction to do so. In the remainder of this chapter, I will deal with the first question: Do we really need educational change as badly as the innovators claim?

Why does education need to change?

In general, people feel that change is needed when they experience a discrepancy between what they expect and their image of what is actually happening. Hence, with regard to education, people’s sense of discrepancy is bound to grow when their expectations of what education should deliver become higher or when their image of what is actually happening in schools has changed. As it turns out, both are the case. Many people’s expectations of what education should deliver have become higher, while at the same time the available empirical evidence provides strong indications that many education systems are falling short of the expectations raised by their own governments or international standards. Both tendencies reinforce each other, which explains why a real sense of urgency regarding the need for educational innovation has gradually built up during the past two decades.

Higher expectations

A wide range of publications emphasize that the quality and effectiveness of education today needs to be higher than ever before.⁷ Michael Fullan⁸ has called this the “moral imperative of raising the bar” for all students. The main reason for this is that the world outside school has drastically changed over the past 30 years. While the technological revolution has completely changed the way we receive and exchange information, establish and maintain social relations, and even the way we shop and bank, globalization has made our personal and professional lives more diverse and dynamic from an ethnic, social, and cultural point of view. Such profound societal changes put the educational curriculum under pressure. If one of the major aims of education is to prepare young people for life outside of school, then the curriculum should be updated to include the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that people need to function well in the globalized, technological, and rapidly changing societies of the 21st century. For instance, to cope with the information overload generated by modern technology, every student needs to become a skilled, critical, and efficient information worker. To respond to the superdiversity that characterizes many societies today, students need to develop advanced levels of interpersonal and intercultural competences. To contribute to the global knowledge and learning economy and find rewarding jobs, students should develop other skills than the ones required in industrial and agrarian economies. To avert some of the great crises facing humanity today – climate change, loss of biodiversity, depletion of natural resources, mass migration waves, terrorism–people should develop relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes with regard to sustainable lifestyles, democratic citizenship, and the promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence.

Sticking to the 20th-century curriculum won’t do. Curricula designed and implemente...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Major challenges for education in the 21st century
• 2 Defining the goals of 21st-century education
• 3 The kick of learning
• 4 Effective education in the 21st century
• 5 Assessment for sustainable learning
• 6 Maximal learning opportunities for all
• 7 The power of teachers
• 8 A whole village or a whole world?
• 9 Conclusion
• Index