Week 30 - The Broader Professional Context

We are hearing phrases like “future-focussed education” and “21^st century learning skills” and the impact or lack of impact that both of these ideas are having on our students today. 

What:

A trend that I am seeing happening a lot is educators pedagogy of supporting students in a future-focussed education, based around developing and extending knowledge of 21^st century learning skills.  Gone are the days where students are sitting in rows of desks, facing the front, with the teacher at the front standing by a board regurgitating the same lesson they did a decade ago. 

So What:

The New Zealand Curriculum (2007) “encourages students to look to the future by exploring such significant future-focused issues as sustainability, citizenship, enterprise, and globalization” (p. 9).  The issue here is that not many students in the primary sector, which I work, would be given the opportunity to do this, unless they have a future-focussed teacher and principal, that is willing to let go of the leads and let their students select the path that they are interested in.

Education has moved away from teaching students reading, writing and maths.  It has pushed forward in educating and preparing students to work collaboratively on real-world issues and situations.  A future-focussed education is one where students are presented with a “wicked problem” (Bolstad, 2011).  A problem that cannot be solved simply by using mathematically solutions.  A wicked problem involves using a variety of skills, strategies, knowledge and understanding, working together to achieve positive outcomes.  Let our students explore and discover that they do have the ability to solve wicked problems.  If teachers were willing to present their students with a wicked problem tomorrow, they would be encompassing the New Zealand Curriculum of future focus of sustainability, citizenship, enterprise, and globalisation. 

Now What:

I see the positive benefit of presenting students with wicked problems as educators are able to develop students understanding, strategies and skills around 21^st century learning skills, as well as the Key Competencies for NZC (2007, p. 12 & 13) of thinking, using language, symbols and text, managing self, relating to others and participating and contributing.  As well as developing an understanding of Key Competencies, a future-focussed educator should use the 21st Century Learning Design rubric, developed by ITL Research, Innovation Teaching and Learning, in partnership with Microsoft.  Their guide provides a details outline of six key areas of focus for 21^st century learning:

• Collaboration
• Knowledge construction
• Self-regulation
• Real-world problem-solving and innovation
• The use of ICT for learning
• Skilled communication

These skills are becoming more valuable as the world keeps moving forward to a more highly advanced, digital, robotic and fast pace environment.  As educators, we need to ensure that we are keeping abreast to all the advances of technological use in the classroom.  A positive step is that New Zealand has move forward in designing and implementing the Digital Technologies Hangarau Matihiko curriculum that will support teachers in developing lessons for their students.  This is still in draft form, but teachers can still access it now and test some of the ideas.  We need to learn to know, so we can learn to do, which supports learning to live together, so we can learn to be (Bolstad, 2011, from Delors, 1996, p. 86).

Reference:

Bolstad, R. (2011).  Taking a “future focus” in education – what does it mean?  An NZCER working paper from the Future-Focussed Issues in Education (FFI) project. 

ITL Research Innovative Teaching and Learning.  21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics.  Microsoft Partners in Learning.

Ministry of Education, (2007).  The New Zealand Curriculum for English-medium teaching and learning in years 1 – 13.  First published by Learning Media Limited, Wellington, New Zealand.

Ministry of Education, (2017).  Digital Technologies Hangarau Matihiko (Draft for consultation).  Published 2017 by the Ministry of Education. 

Picture - Retrieved from http://www.mindmake.com/blog/education-technology-and-the-twenty-first-century-skills-gap/