Page 21 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

We must consider the implications embedded in the change in the ratio of those people that are required to be self-managers (20%), to those that require managing (80%). Last century this was 20:80 and this century it has suddenly shifted to 80:20. We need to address this shift urgently and ensure that most learners have the competence and capability, to apply the Learning Process and have a mindset that enables them to be successful in this century.
Where does that leave reading and writing? It takes 2,000–4,00017 hours to establish a variable capacity to read and write. This learning task is the learner’s first formal learning experience in school and that experience results in a distribution curve of success that convinces far too many learners that they are not very successful learners. Is that the ideal outcome of a child’s first learning experience? We are not being flippant; these are serious questions and we must debate these issues, as there are no obvious answers currently in place.
Learner Agency
If we give someone agency over their world they generally rise to the occasion and increasingly manage their world more successfully, but only if we provide them with the underlying competencies to achieve this. No one ever likes being told what to do and it frustrates us when other adults tell us what to do and how that must be done. We want to feel we have some control over our world, whether we are 2 or 102 years old.
What we are calling for here is a transformation in our thinking about expectations for ourselves as teachers and for the students in our classrooms. Both roles need to be transformed, enabling students to become learner-educators, and for teachers to become educator-learners. Educators and learners should love the experience of school; seriously, they all should, as learning is the key to unlocking our curiosity and our ability to explore our world. This resource describes a possible scenario for how this setoff transitions may take place. This transformation process is a 2– 3year process of consistent Professional Learning,18 working on three key domains that each school and every education system now needs to address:
1. Empowering learners with the competency to take agency over their learning.
2. Ensuring that educators and learners can apply the Learning Process successfully.
3. Reinventing the current topic or thematic based curriculum into a conceptually-based curriculum.
As schools increasingly focus on building learning capacity, rather than teaching, we can develop the independent lifelong learners that society requires, and is now demanding. Learners must now have a sense of their identity, to be able to think and question, manage their world and collaborate successfully, connect their new learning to their existing understanding and apply their language of learning in a way that allows them to share their learning more efficiently, effectively and with consistency.
17 Specific data on this is hard to come by, but if we assume no pre-school or learning to read and write at home and also assume 3 hours per day learning to read and write for the first two years of school then this equates to 1200 hours of learning. This is sufficient to move ‘most’ learners from ‘learning to read’ stage to the ‘reading to learn’ stage. A further 3 years of learning and refining their capacity to read and write will still not necessarily result in fluency for each learner. The total number of hours is now 3000 hours. By this point the explicit teaching of reading and writing is reducing while the practical application and refinement of reading and writing is increasing. Assuming two hours of this per day would add another 700 hours of refinement totalling 3700 hours and we will still not have all learners fluent in their native/indigenous language. This is unpacked further in Chapter 10 of this resource.
18 Most Professional Learning for educators often does not have the endpoint in mind. The endpoint is for learners to take agency over their learning to become independent lifelong learner-educators using their learning capability to make a difference in their own and our shared world.
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