Page 9 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

Introduction
Mark Treadwell works with school systems, jurisdictions and individual schools that are coming to terms with a world that is changing at an unprecedented rate and where change is endemic; a world where the ability to learn independently and collaboratively, is now the most important capability that we can gift to anyone. As educators, we urgently need to transform our purpose to meet this new and demanding set of requirements of our society. The focus of this resource is to bring about Vygotsky’s request - albeit a century late.
The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. Lev Vygotsky (1930)
This resource presents a model for how the brain learns based on the latest neuroscientific, psychological and sociological research. In this model, the human brain is unique in having four+1 integrated learning systems, with each learning system having a unique associated memory system and cellular architecture. Hopefully this is a useful model!
"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."1 George Box
This resource is underpinned by a range of well-researched learning frameworks and although
they are not explicitly described in the text, they are foundational to the nature of this work.
1. The SOLO taxonomy developed by Biggs & Collis2 opened up the opportunity to develop not just a conceptual curriculum but a conceptual frame for learning per se. Pam Hook3 provides an excellent introduction to this seminal work by way of a series of animated ‘videos’.4 We would encourage the viewing of these.
2. This set of resources is not an alternative curriculum to what you are currently using but rather it should be used to unify your desire to prepare learners for this century and meet the outcomes of your present curriculum more efficiently. To empower learners for this century, learners will require the necessary competencies, increased agency over their learning, and an understanding of how they learn, as well as have the capability and the confidence to creatively be innovative and ingenious.
3. The work of Art Costa5 should also be held up at this point as a seminal piece of work surrounding the creation of ‘ways of thinking,’ that we have come to view through the terminology of ‘habits of mind’. These are indeed habits and as this resource highlights, habits are foundational to almost everything we do, but not all habits are good ones; this collection by Art are good learning habits!
4. John Hattie’s research work on Visible Learning is a good guide for all educators, with the top six performance indicators, highlighted by John in the link to this video (below), being an essential starting point.6
Mark Treadwell
mark@work.co.nz http://www.MarkTreadwell.com https://mtreadwell.wordpress.com/ @MarkTreadwell1
1 Box, George E. P.; Norman R. Draper (1987). Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, p. 424, Wiley. ISBN 0471810339. 2 Biggs J. & Collis K. (1982) Evaluating the Quality of Learning: The SOLO Taxonomy. New York: Academic Press
(see also http://www.johnbiggs.com.au/academic/solo-taxonomy/)
3 Hook,P (2016) The SOLO Taxonomy Retrieved from http://pamhook.com/solo-taxonomy/
4 Hook P. HookED. (July 24 2016) HookED SOLO Define Map Animation. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/user/Chokearti/videos 5 Costa A. (2016) Habits of Mind Institute. Retrieved from http://www.habitsofmindinstitute.org/
6 Hattie, John. (2013) Why are so many of our teachers and schools so successful? TEDx Norrkoping Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzwJXUieD0U