Page 148 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

136
Introducing concepts via ‘safe’ contexts is critical when making this transition from a context orientated curriculum to a conceptual one. One of the outcomes of the Global Curriculum Project has been to create these resources and both are currently being tested in schools.
A curriculum that is relevant in this century presents a clear purpose and includes an integrated set of transitions in our practice that results in a learning experience for the learners that prepares them to become independent lifelong learners prepared for the world that they will enter. We refer to these transitions as the six pillars. These are:
1. School leadership and staff having clarity surrounding the purpose of school as a rationale for the transition in our focus to establishing learning as being central to our purpose.
2. A focus on increasing the agency of the learner over their learning, which is underpinned by the competencies.
3. The shift in how we view intelligence, based on how the brain learns and how well we can apply the resulting optimal Learning Process.
4. Understanding the role of technology and creating learning environments that are purposely designed to optimise learning and the application of the Learning Process.
5. Assessment of educator practice using the Action Learning Process and applying formative assessment processes to
assess the learners learning.
6. Implementing concept-based competencies and ‘learning domains’ that are focussed on building conceptual understanding, and creatively applying that understanding to be
innovative and ingenious.
Assembling a 21stC Curriculum
Resource 65: The Six Curriculum Pillars
In this century, the emerging curriculum reflects a new set of expectations representing our global community. We should no longer expect young people to be managed throughout their day by teachers who tell them exactly what to do, when to do it and how to do it. The relationship between the teacher and the student must now be a relationship between learners-educators and the educator-learners. This transition results in building the capacity for learners to become independent lifelong learners that take increasing agency over their learning.
This transition however, is complicated by the tension within parent communities between the needs of the learner-educators and the ‘feelings’ that parents/caregivers have about what schools should be and what schools should teach their children. Parents have a natural, but somewhat distorted feeling, that even though they may not have enjoyed their school experience, they still think the discipline of the classroom and their lack of any autonomy or agency in the process, was good for them. It was not particularly good for them but it was a convenient way to ensure the stereotypes and the ways of being within communities would continue.
One of our key roles as educators is to open-up a dialogue with parents/caregivers that will investigate the capability sets our young people will need to successfully navigate this century and then we can address the outcomes of those discussions.