Page 72 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

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Learning how to drive is complex but the bizarre, and the beautiful thing about our brain, is that we can navigate complex situations such as the roundabout, without thinking as in the photo below. Drivers must navigate the central roundabout anticlockwise and the external roundabouts clockwise. And no, people that schools label as ‘not intelligent’ do not fail to navigate this roundabout, but drive around it as easily as those labelled ‘smart’ in schools. To make matters even crazier, the people that failed in school, as well as the successful ones, navigate this roundabout without any conscious thinking about the process.
Resource 29: The Complexity of Roundabouts
If schools taught driving in the same way that hard subjects were taught, we would start with lessons on the history of the car and how each car part worked, we would make paper-mâché models of cars and do experiments with petrol and air, write stories and poetry about cars, imagine that we were cars and write about how we would feel in our drama classes, and draw numerous labelled diagrams. Potential drivers would progress to the next task even if they did not understand the previous concept. Based on last century’s school model, the best way to teach a learner to drive a car would be to sit the student in the passenger seat and have them watch a professional driver, drive the car for 1–2 years while developing a sound knowledge about driving cars!
Whether learning to drive or learning any other task, the lesson to be learned is to keep the rote- learned knowledge via reading and writing to a minimum, introducing the requisite knowledge Just-In-Time, while working through a very specific and clear sequence of cognitively appropriate concepts. Educators need to ensure that each learning sequence has been thought through, making sure that the learning intentions are clear. The next stage is to introduce the concept using a context that the learner had some existing vocabulary and some experience in. Lesson one for learner drivers is not to do hill starts on a steep hill in the central business district, but we will happily do the equivalent with 10-year old learners by studying the Aztecs? How abstract is that?