Blog Juice for Educational Technology

A few months ago, the folks at WorldBridges hosted a discussion with me and Terry Freedman, from the U.K. The discussion got casual, and I casually used the term Shallow Standards. Its a term that I’ve used before, and especially in my “Redefining Literacy…” book. The problem is that the term requires a lot more context than I gave in that conversation, and now several bloggers have picked up the term. I’d like to spend this space with a bit of a discussion, to build some context.

First of all, some assumptions:

1. Standards are the bits and bodies of knowledge and skills we expect to be taught and that we expect all students to learn.
2. Shallow is “Measuring little from bottom to top or surface; lacking physical depth.”^*
3. Competition is an act of “measuring oneself against others”^*, given similar conditions, resources, and goals.
4. Cooperate is to “work or act together toward a common end or purpose”^*, each contributing unique resources, skills, and perspectives to the task.
5. That it is not appropriate and even counter-productive to say that we are educating our children so that we can compete in a global economy. It is more productive to say that we are preparing our children to cooperate in a global economy.
6. For a future of rapid change, it is critical that we teach our students to teach themselves. Life-long learning skills should be an explicit part of what our students do in our classrooms.

* Dictionary.Com

In a pre-life-long Learning environment, the task of education was to teach all of us the knowledge and skills that we would need to know and to know how to do to become employed. After our schooling, we got a job, and kept that job for 35 years. We did some learning “on the job”, but not for the sake of a changing environment. It was for the sake of our job. It was considered part of the job.

In a world that demands life-long learning skills, it is a mistake, and even arrogant, to believe that defining a robust body of knowledge and pressuring teachers to teach that body of knowledge to all students will lead to a successful future. Instead, success in a rapidly changing (flat) world happens to people who are, according to Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat:

• Special
• Specialized
• Highly Adaptable
• Anchored

There are only a few special people. I don’t know any. Michael Jordan is special. Anchored people draw income by touching us or something that we own. These are barbers and chefs. But both of these categories of workers will live off of the economy that is generated by those who are specialized (can do things or know things that no one else does) and the highly adaptable (can learning things, unlearn, and relearn very easily).

It’s the middle two that we must focus on as educators. Our students must leave school able to make themselves experts and able to teach themselves, becoming learners and relearners. Our current model does not do this. Currently, our process is the have a blueprint (the standards), and
 to usher our children through assembly lines,
  installing the elements of the blueprint,
   and then applying quality control at the end,
    making sure that every child knows the same things,
     thinks the same way, and
      solves problems in the same way.

In their future,
 it won’t be what they know that’s the same
  that will bring success to their endeavors.
   It will be what they know that’s different,
    how they think that different,
     how they solve problems that’s different.

This is why I believe that our standards should be made much more shallow. Schooling should be responsible for assure that every student knows only that knowledge and those skills that create a productive context for the lives of all students. As a society, we must have a common sense of where, when, what, how, and why we live; and how our environment affects us and how we affect our environment. Schooling should also assure that each student has the basic literacy skills appropriate to the contemporary information environment.

Students should spend a predominant amount of their time making themselves experts in areas of knowledge and experience that are especially interesting to them, and then sharing their gained knowledge and experience with other students. We go from a curriculum model that looks like a hall way that students move down, being saturated by a robust set of knowledge array of disciplines, with little integration of subject areas:

..to a curriculum model that that looks more like a sphere with the student in the middle. The smaller version of the sphere represents the knowledge and skills that are essential to building a context for the students, and the larger sphere represents everything else that is available to learn:

A predominant part of the students schooling involves identifying an area of interest and learning all that they can, leading to a valuable product, and a learning experience for the rest of the class (I use the term class loosely). The teacher crafts the students self-teaching experiences to assure involvement in all areas of context (geography, culture, history, science, economy, society, and contemporary literacy). The result is a presentation of some sort that provides a rich exposure to the area of interest to the rest of the class.

Collaboration occurs when more than one student (in the same class or at a distance) has the same interest and works together on their learning. Of course, collaboration takes on many other forms as well.

This is fairly out there, and totally counter to the current instructional model that is being imposed on us.

Please feel free to tear it apart and share your own model.

But what we’re doing now is wrong, dangerous, and not in our (U.S.) national interests. Of that, I am sure.

Figures come from
(Warlick, David. Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century. Columbus: Linworth, 2004.)