New Horizons for Learning: Transforming Education

Nine Steps to Transform Education

(The ideas in this article are presented in detail in The Learning Revolution, by Gordon Dryden and Jeannette Vos)

by Gordon Dryden

After spending the past ten years searching the globe for the world's best learning breakthroughs, and looking at business innovations, several key points emerge:

The world is hurtling through a revolution that will change society much, much more than the industrial revolution, the invention of printing or electricity.

Every country desperately needs a learning revolution to match the revolution in communications and technology.

Every business needs to continually reinvent itself to stay in business. The most effective, such as GE, Cisco, Dell, Oracle and Microsoft, are showing the way.

But public education is lagging light years behind business. Were Rip Van Winkle to wake up today after sleeping for 130 years probably the only thing he would recognize would be the typical school classroom.

Fortunately, the needed revolution in schooling is gaining pace, but only in pockets around the world.

I personally believe that information and communications technology is the catalyst that will at last force the vital changes that are needed.   This is NOT to say that ICT is itself the key to reforming schooling or education, but it is the catalyst.

Nearly every school and educational system in the world is trying to get to grips with ICT. But nearly all are doing it incorrectly because they are trying to graft 21st-century technology on to a 19th-century school model.    Even our top universities are making the same blunder: replacing black-and-white overhead projector transparencies with one-way PowerPoint color presentations.

Technology now makes it possible to store all the world's knowledge and make it available, on demand, almost instantly, in almost every form, to almost everyone on earth.   This means the traditional teacher's role as mainly a purveyor of information is completely outdated. More importantly, the instant communications revolution makes it possible for all school leaders, principals and teachers to have instant access to the world's best teaching and learning models. Here are nine such steps that I believe are keys to change:

Work out how the world is changing
To be relevant in a rapidly-changing world, educationalists need to know the shape of things to come. We've tried to summarize key points in The Learning Revolution, but two other key books can help:

Visions, by Michio Kaku, subtitled "How science will revolutionize the 21st century."
The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas Friedman, which includes an excellent chapter on "the nine habits of highly effective countries".

Study the world's most successful businesses
Jack Welch, America's most successful manager of the past half century, has reinvented GE at least four times in the past 20 years.   In that time he has increased its sales from $26 billion to $111 billion a year.
Michael Dell has completely reinvented personal-computer distribution in the past 15 years.   Now every customer, anywhere in the world, can effectively design one's own personal computer from a wide variety of components.
Cisco, a company not formed 15 years ago, now achieves sales of $40 million a day on the internet.   And around 90 per cent of its high-tech customer inquiries are answered by other customers on the internet.
Just imagine what would happen if America's 2.7 million public school teachers, and 2.7 million other employees in public education, applied both those models to schooling!   You'd have an instant web of the country's best teaching breakthroughs and best lesson plans.

Use ICT as a catalyst for change

Mention information and communications technology to many teachers and parents and they tend to confuse it with television.
ICT is NOT one-way communication. It should not involve students spending all day in front of a computer screen.   It should not only involve children in playing with computer games or published CD-ROMs, although they can help.
One of the world's best elementary schools using ICT in a fantastic way is Tahatai (it means 'by the sea") Coast elementary school in New Zealand.   It has only two PCs in every classroom, but a wide range of other modern communications from video cameras to musical instruments.
The main aim of the school is to prepare its students to become self-acting, self-learning, self-motivated "inventors of their own future", global citizens competent and confident to analyze any problem based on the past, the present, the likely alternative options for the future.   And, more importantly, to then reinvent an even better future.
All five-year-olds at Tahatai can produce computer animation. All seven-year-olds have individual websites. Eight-year-olds write and illustrate digital stories. Ten-year-olds have produced award-winning videotape programs, to a standard that I personally cannot achieve by myself after half a lifetime working as a television producer.
This school has a 30 percent "minority" population in an area with low incomes. Yet all students emerge from elementary school, at age 12 or 13, with skills much higher than I have seen in most American high-school senior classes.   No truancy. No graffiti. And students line up from 7 a.m. each day eager to get into school.   They also use the entire world as a classroom.
Instead of a narrow, class-track curriculum, Tahatai involves all the school in researching and studying four themes a year, such as "conservation", "the sea", or "bridges - including bridges between cultures".
Last year, for instance, in the theme on "conservation", Tahatai's kindergarten students wrote and illustrated their own computer story on a kiwi (flightless bird) caught in a forest trap, and rescued by two children. They backed it with the music of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and produced a wonderful animation of a pianist playing part of the score. Twelve-year-olds found a television crew that was in their district shooting a program on water conservation; so they decided to produce their own professional videotape, on how to produce a professional TV program on conservation.

Develop a global curriculum
Of course all students should emerge from school able to read, write, spell and count. (I've videotaped children around the world who can do this readily BEFORE starting school, and, in such countries as Sweden, able to speak three languages fluently before age five.)
But more importantly, I suggest, is to encourage students, like those at Tahatai, to become global citizens: ready to produce a better and self-sustaining global civilization.
One excellent example is Singapore's Overseas Family School, which uses the International Baccalaureate curriculum from preschool through to grade 12. Many senior high schools use the highly-disciplined IB curriculum for grade 11 and 12 students, but its real benefit comes much earlier.
That's because it is based on "focused inquiry": the eight best ways to involve students in becoming self-learners. The first nation or state to embrace the complete IB program, I suggest, will lead the world in schooling, particularly if it links it in with the ICT "inquiry-based" model used at a handful of schools such as Tahatai.

Retrain all teachers
No educational reform will work unless all principals and teachers are fully involved, and "own" the process.
Particularly with ICT, older teachers, in particular, will experience the same fear that strikes most of the population when faced with dramatic changes in working style and lifestyle.
Singapore's OFS has broken through that barrier by giving all its students experience in other international IB schools.   Tahatai provided all teachers with two weeks of ICT training before it opened for business.   The following year all its teachers visited leading United States schools.
Other wonderful examples abound. Take the OFS model for DAILY retraining.   With 26 nationalities among its 1750 students, it decided this year to make a second language mandatory.   And it now offers all students, from age 5, a choice of English, Mandarin, German, French, Spanish and Japanese, all taught by native-speakers.   And while those daily classes are running, the other teachers meet for retraining in other IB methods.
I personally and strongly favor all school districts having at least one multimedia teacher retraining center, where teachers learn how to marry the world's best ICT with the world's best teaching methods.

Make the entire world your classroom
Sitting inside a school classroom all day is not the best way to learn. So move out into the world, and focus learning on real-life experiences.
OFS does this, in part, with its big IB community-service program. Tahatai does it as part of its total inquiry-based learning process.
And Freyberg High School in New Zealand is a world leader in integrated studies. Quite often you'll find an entire class off on a one-week adventure camp, investigating case-study models, or taking on a practical business project, like analyzing their city's traffic flows or redesigning school furniture. Inside each project, students integrate science, history, geography, mathematics, statistics, English and computer studies. When they have to sit New Zealand's national subject examinations at the end of three years in high school, their results exceed the national average by 30 percent.

Start before school
We now know that about 50 per cent of a person's ability to learn is developed in the first four years of life, certainly before age 5. That does NOT mean 50 percent of one's knowledge or wisdom. It simply means that 50 percent of the brain's most important pathways are developed in those first few years. And all future knowledge will be based on early experiences.
This means that parents are the world's most important teachers, and home the most important school.   Yet not one country spends even 3 percent of its educational budget on the first 4 years of life. And not one spends even one percent on parenting education. For me it would be top priority.
Students do not drop out of school at 15 or 16. They drop out at 5 or 6, and hang around for 10 years to make it legal. And the basis for their failure lies squarely in the preschool years.

Involve everyone
For years too many people have confused schooling with education, sickness with health. And all too often the education debate is led by those adults who succeeded in "the old school system".   That system was deliberately designed on the 20-30-50 principle.   It did (and does) a great job of selecting and teaching the 20 percent "bright academic" students.   It did a reasonable job of selecting and training another 30 percent to become the clerks, typists and trades people.   And it did a skimpy job of selecting and providing "the basics" to the 50 percent who once found jobs as farm or manual laborers.
A century ago 50 percent of Americans worked on farms.   Today 2 percent produce enough food for the other 270 million. And unskilled manual labor is almost a relic of a bygone age.
We now know that everyone of us has a different learning style, thinking style and working style, and that most of our army of dropouts have a different learning style to our "academics". So its vital to identify and cater to all different styles, so all can achieve.
Likewise: the need to show all citizens that lifetime learning and relearning is possible, and enjoyable.

Debate the best alternatives
Above all is the need to lift the nature of the "educational debate". Far too often around the world, dogma continues to substitute for research, communications and common sense.
The widespread American debate on phonics versus "whole language" in reading is typical. (The syllables that make up the 550,000 words in English are spelled in 70 main ways. Around half are phonetic, generally those with short vowels, and half are not phonetic. So combining both methods is highly desirable.) But even worse is the debate about archaic alternatives.
As mentioned, I strongly believe that ICT, the world of instant communications, is the catalyst that is forcing us to completely rethink everything we've ever learned about education. It also provides the channels through which we can learn of the world's best, and choose from them.

What a tragedy if we continued to leave such common sense to the leaders of business.

About the Author

A New Zealand-based "global citizen", Gordon Dryden has spent much of the past 10 years searching the world for breakthroughs in learning. He is author of The Learning Revolution, and has produced 22 television programs on the same subject. He is a journalist, and for many years he was New Zealand's most popular radio talk show host.

website:   www.thelearningweb.net
email: gordon@learningweb.co.nz

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