[post_intro]There’s a lot of talk about 21st century education. There are the skills that children need, the jobs that don’t exist yet, the access to learning anywhere and all the wonderful things the internet enables us to do. All of this is valuable, I think, but I wonder how much it is side-stepping the real issue?[/post_intro]
When I first started teaching, the wonderful Annie Younger pointed something out to me. She said that “children will learn from you even when you don’t want them to. It is a blessing and a curse.” What she meant was that in a school you are constantly observed. Not just in lessons, but in the corridor, talking to colleagues, spilling soup on your shirt in the dining room and the children learn from that too.
Much of the 21st century thinking about schools that I have read has focused on overt areas( e.g. assessment and badges) and times (e.g. homework and flipped classrooms) when we do want children to learn. Badges, flipped classrooms and the like. This is all good. Perhaps, though, we are ignoring think more about the tacit, unintended, soup-spilling messages our 20th century schools are giving out.
The main one, for me, is the structure. Perhaps more out of tradition than intent, schools are hierarchical, command-and-control beasts. While yes it’s good to look at ways to reinvent the classroom, what if we had a closer look at the way our schools were structured? It’s always easier to think in binary terms – hierarchy (bad) vs wirearchy (good) – and there is a danger that that blurs much of the goodness in the overlap but should we be beginning to adjust the organisational structures to fit a more fluid world? Does a school need a head? How do we embed teams? Should we? How do we engage in a less us and them manner with parents and communities?
Dave Gray‘s talk below is a great starting point for thinking about this.
As a teacher it’s hugely exciting to be able to use all the magic of technology. It’s great to be able to tweet and blog and share photos and get classrooms connecting with others around the world. That is, as Annie Younger might have said, part of what I want the children to learn. What I’m not sure I want them to learn is that all of this happens despite, not because of, a school’s structure. The values that are implicit in what I am trying to teach are not necessarily carried through in the way my colleagues and I work. That is the soup on my shirt.