Every year our board produces a video. I got to watch it (twice) this week. It is very good.
One of the messages is about how our board prepares students for a very complex future. I started thinking about how education has changed (or not) in response to our global community where information and knowledge is at our fingertips 24/7. Historically the teacher was the keeper of all knowledge. If you didn’t go to school and listen to the teacher, you didn’t know stuff. But, when was the last time you wondered about something and didn’t find the answer instantly by googling it? Today, it is easy to find out stuff. So what is the teacher’s role now? And, what about the stuff—don’t kids still need to know stuff?
Kids do need to know stuff. They need to know how to read and how to read critically because there is more information to sift through. It is far more efficient to know your timestables and addition facts than to pull out your phone (I almost wrote calculator!). But, I would pull out my phone to solve 3425/49, knowing though, whether the answer was reasonable or whether I’d mis-pushed the buttons. It is helpful to have an understanding of the geography of Canada, our history and how the scientific elements are organized. We can’t get along without knowing stuff. When you know stuff, then learning other stuff makes more sense. When you know stuff you can access more. When you know stuff, you can talk to people.
But other things are also increasingly important to know how to do. It is important to be able to solve problems creatively, especially since most of the jobs our students will do have yet to be invented. It is important to be able to think critically. It is important to know how to find the other stuff you want to learn and how to synthesize it with what you already know. It is important to be able to work collaboratively.
In the days when the teacher was the holder of all knowledge, it took a long time to pass all the knowledge on and we sort of left the other stuff until later, maybe. The idea of school was the transmission of the stuff. Today we need to find a balance of learning the stuff and the process of learning. That’s your challenge. Sometimes we think that in the “new” way of doing things is only about the process and that we aren’t supposed to teach the stuff. We think that we have to have kids doing inquiry, doing projects and collaborating all of the time and that means we don’t have to worry about the stuff.
We do need to worry about the stuff. First of all, rich problems, rich inquiry and rich collaboration all work much better around a strong knowledge base. And, the problems, the inquiry and collaboration are the processes for arriving at the stuff. When we have students work in pairs or groups problem-solving in math, the ultimate goal is that each student will learn the stuff. When student develop inquiry questions in the social sciences, they are learning the stuff as they answer their questions. When students engage in the process of writing for a specific audience and purpose, they are learning the stuff of the writer’s craft. In the past, we taught the stuff and then let them do the higher order thinking. Now, we learn the stuff as we are doing the higher order thinking.
So, the teacher’s role is still about getting kids to know the stuff. But the process by which students learn stuff has shifted. Instead of telling kids the stuff and having them memorize and regurgitate, they learn the stuff through the processes of inquiry, collaboration and problem-solving. As they are learning the stuff, they are also learning to think creatively and critically, to solve problems, to synthesize and evaluate information and to work with others.
As you begin your year, think about how you set up your students to know the stuff through processes which develop their creativity, flexibility, and curiosity.
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