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Finding the Time to do the Things that Matter
If we are going to expand the curriculum to include the competencies, understand the Learning Process, provide students with increased agency over their learning, introduce a range of new technologies and move to a conceptual curriculum, we must find ways to learn more efficiently and effectively.
To solve this conundrum, educators will need to make some considerable adaptations within their profession if we are going to achieve the aims above. How we achieve this will require us to ask some additional questions such as: how critical is it for learners to...
• have a sense of their identity; of being aware of their self-talk and its influence on their thinking and learning?
• be able to ask different types of questions to drive their thinking and learning deeper?
• be self-aware and manage their world effectively and efficiently?
• be able to collaborate effectively and efficiently?
• reflect on their learning and connect their new learning to existing understanding?
• have a language that allows them to talk about their learning more precisely?
Are these capabilities any more, or less important than studying some of the topics that sit in our current curriculum? If learners do not have these capabilities, what are their chances of doing well in our increasingly complex world? As educators, we need to reflect and ask ourselves these questions and ensure we are achieving our purpose as educators. As educators, a key part of our role is in enabling young people to become independent, lifelong learners that have the capability to solve complex problems, be creative, innovative and ingenious, communicate effectively in small and large groups and successfully contribute to the growth of their communities.
We refer to the set of capabilities that underpin effective learning as the competencies. When we examine the capabilities that are required for this century it becomes clear that gifting our learners the ability to be competent surpasses the remembering of a substantial amount of knowledge about the Aztecs, photosynthesis or logarithms.
It is time to start looking far more critically at the focus of the learning that takes place in our schools and critique our practices and expectations. Thematic units of work currently underpin most curricula in almost all global education systems. The shift to a conceptual curriculum allows us to rethink the notion that all units of work take the same length of time to be learned, and that themes and topics are the most efficient and effective architecture to underpin successful learning.
If we want students to become learner-educators and independent, lifelong learners, then we must address the ‘crowded curriculum’ question.
There are five strategic transitions that we can implement for students to learn more efficiently and effectively and become learner-educators. Each transition takes time to implement and the order of their implementation is important.
A. Limited Timeframes
How is it that dinosaurs, space, the rocky shore and ‘climate change’ all take the same length of time to teach, whether that is 3, 4, 6 or 10 weeks? Who decided that? Could we make each unit of work shorter by a few days, or even weeks? Well, we could but only if we knew how students could know how to learn efficiently and effectively.
One of the top design companies in the world is IDEO and one of their three rules for effective and innovative practice within the company is ‘finite timeframes’.