Page 66 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

54
What is important to work out is what knowledge we do need to remember and ensure that learners in our schools and classrooms know this knowledge and ensure that this knowledge is relevant for each learner.
There is a great danger in the present day lest science teaching should degenerate into the accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory without cultivating the understanding. J.D. Everett, 1873
Last century it was important to remember a lot of knowledge as we could not carry sufficient books around... but twenty years later we can carry an amazing amount of knowledge around with us in our pockets. This technological leap changes everything. If we are to remember knowledge we need to be quite sure that the knowledge underpins key ideas and concepts that are essential for us to understand. This rule is the gatekeeper for establishing what knowledge, learners should learn and remember. The randomness of learning information about Aztecs, the size of planets and memorizing mathematical processes, is bizarre and needs to be replaced by building conceptual understanding.
Buried within this notion is one of our greatest challenges as educators and this is the need to revise our beliefs about what we consider intelligence to be. Intelligence in the previous learning paradigm was reflected by how much learners could remember and what they could recall in any given test. Intelligence is now being redefined far more in line with having the capacity to be able to build conceptual frameworks of understanding about our world, and to do this as efficiently and effectively as possible; Just-In-Time.
Humans did not create mathematics but rather we discovered it, hidden in the relationships between variables everywhere, in the form of patterns that we take for granted every day. The entire universe would decay into randomness if it were not for the language of mathematics that speaks to us about how the elements of the universe interact with each other and how, despite the notion of the second law of thermodynamics, the universe does not decay into dis-order but rather, mathematics overwhelms its own edict and instead creates order and symmetry that we see and feel as beauty, exacting from us the awe and surprise we experience every day, should we take the time to pursue it.
Intelligence leverages curiosity to relentlessly increase our understanding and admiration of the world we inhabit. Beauty surrounds us wherever we are, and comes in many different forms and not are all in plain sight, as there is nothing that is created that is not beautiful, no matter how confusing the camouflage it carries may be.
It is the awe and surprise of learning that we need to leverage, to excite the learners in our care. We need to amplify the patterns and the beauty of our world, over the tedious and somewhat mundane rote-learned remembering of knowledge and then stopping there, far less than halfway through the journey. Learners need to see and feel the world that the knowledge leads us to. We need to celebrate the wonderful leap from knowledge to understanding; seeing the patterns and be overwhelmed
by their simplicity and their beauty.
Mathematics may well underpin the exotic and beautiful symmetry of the snowflake, and while it is a good example of the application of cause and effect and of course, symmetry, how much more powerful could this photograph be as a great prompt, coupled with the question: “What is this? How is it formed and why do we
judge it to be so beautiful?”