Saturday, July 18, 2009

FutureWatch 3

After attending a workshop at USD (University of San Diego) called: Leading Schools in a Flat World "Globalization and Its Implications for Education," I am hopeful about my loves. I love humanities and believe the humanities can be taught using a 21st centruy approach. According to the "gurus" of the 21st century, the future for education is simple yet innovative: teach children to develop their passions and creativity, and prepare students for the technology of the 21st century global economy. For teachers to model passion, three things are needed:
  1. Wide-spread systematic change on all levels (federal/state governments, districts, schools, teachers, parents).
  2. Innovative classroom designs built with the intention of enhancing the skills of our students to meet the needs of a 21st century global economy.
  3. The need for education to develop passions within our students while we address the core curriculum.
The first "guru" I heard from was Michael Fullan, author of The Six Secrets of Change. According to Fullan, wide-spread systematic change is not as difficult as one may think. He says that true reform can be brought about during one election period if these six secrets are applied:
A rule of thumb that Fullan brings up, however, is the "implementation dip." I love the development and implementation stages of ADDIE. I'm going to devlop a completely digital classroom this fall, and I feel so much better about change knowing that an initial "dip" in achievement upon implementation is okay because there is going to be a learning curve. I am not confident I will be able to keep up with designing new lessons, creating job aids for students to complete those lessons, and assessing them appropriately using the new tools such as blogs, wikis, PBL (Project-based learning), and digital portfolios. I do know, however, that if I am honest and passionate with students, they will learn. In my 8 years of teaching, I have noticed the the highlighted years are those where I am doing a significant amount of learning with my students. Year nine will be one of those years.

The second interesting need for the future is the redesign of our 19th century classrooms. While new technologies such as Smart boards (see right) and overhead projectors have innundated classrooms, many teachers are utilizing these technologies in old-school, teacher-centered ways. According to Matthew Spathas, classrooms of the future need not only technology, but complete remodeling so that they can be student-centered, teacher facilitated areas of learning that enhance the passions of our children while preparing them for the "flat" world of the future. In other words, our children are preparing for jobs where global corporations will require them to collaborate at a distance with folks from China, India, Europe, South America, etc. Our children will need to adopt a Net Gen culture and be accustomed to PBL. In addition, our posterity will need to be internationally minded, creative, and innovative. Spathas envisions a student-centered, teacher facilited classroom that resembles this:

Finally, our teachers will need to bring out the passions of our children. According to Dr. Zhao of Michigan State University, our students' math test scores have been far below those of other countries since the 1960s. Yet, America has continued to prosper economically and currently holds and exports more patents than any other country in the world. This is because Americans are passionate and creative. The worry is if we lose this aspect of our culture in exchange for enhanced math scores, then we will lose our greatest resource, our creativity. In exchange, we will produce a ton of out-of-work engineers who lack both projects to work on and jobs that will go to Asians working for global corporations for far less pay.

Zhao's statistics brought me right back to the love I speak of in my own comprehensive reflection. I love humanities, yet I also love that I have so many new ways of facilitating the learning of humanities as a result of being a graduate student of Educational Technology at SDSU (San Diego State University). If we expect our teachers to implement new technologies in their classrooms, and implement widespread systematic change, then our teachers need to develop TPCK (technological pedagogical content knowledge). TPCK is most effectively developed in teachers when professional development is conducted in a teacher's content area, their passion. My final conclusion is that if we want to reform our classrooms to meet the needs of the 21st century global economy, then we need to model what it looks like for teachers so that they can implement wide-spread systematic change.

For further information about TPCK, see my Literature Review.

References:

Fullan, Michael. (2009). The Six Secrets of Change. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA.

Liebke, Juliana. (2008). "Designing Professional Development to Enhance Technology Integration in the K-12 Science Classroom."

Spathas, Matthew. http://www.ibrary.com/digitalthoughts/

Zhao, Yong. http://zhao.educ.msu.edu/