Every teacher has asked this question. As we plod our way through curriculum materials that are sometimes outdated, heading towards assessments that too often feel disconnected from our students' real lives.
For me, as a language teacher, the question became a nagging thorn in my side when I realised I was teaching towards a goal of fluency which only a handful of students even really wanted to pursue, while missing the needs of the whole cohort to gain a wider vision of the world. For Katherine Cadwell, it was when students plodded into her philosophy class saying 'just tell me how to earn an A'. She criticises traditional education for rewarding the product not process of inquiry, and encourages stepping back stepping back to allow students to step up in their learning. To Stephen Hughes this shift in thinking means realising that the things that build our brains can't be assessed on tests. As Brian Lozenski has suggested, we want to focus on diversifying ways of participating instead of just the content knowledge we offer. For Jennifer Klein and Kapono Ciotti it's about abandoning the myth of education as a race with everyone at one starting line, and reframing education in the image of a landscape where each student fits in their ecosystem and journeys towards their own goal on a distant horizon.
Traditional curriculum and teaching practices do what they were designed to very well: They provide a testing ground where future employees can prove their competence in some of the skills needed for an industrial society, and where those with the ability and motivation to compete in this game of school can follow a pathway to higher level studies, emerging as an elite meritocracy. But in today's changing world, that system, originally designed for the age of the industrial revolution, does not necessarily meet our needs.
Are we preparing students to become responsible citizens, resilient entrepreneurs, creative change-makers? In our effort to teach towards proficiency in our subject areas are we engaging students in what's really worth learning? Are we covering so much of what to learn for assessments, that they are missing why and how to learn? Are we preparing students to solve the crises of tomorrow, or just to enrol in university programs designed at a time before most of those crises existed? Are we empowering students to engage with the many cultures and perspectives they will surely encounter in their own home towns and on their own phones? Or are we teaching them to read maps and speak languages as they were taught before the internet, back when slow travel was the only travel and it was enough to absorb inter-cultural skills gradually along the way?
As educators we've approached these questions from several perspectives, and more modern approaches to teaching and learning offer innovative possibilities. We're exploring teaching for 21st century skills, Global Competence and Citizenship Education, social & emotional learning. We've flipped classrooms and facilitated inquiry while designing learning that is universally accessible, that is task-based, project-based, and mastery-based. We've waffled between trying to check our progress with increased testing, versus inspiring our students to understand that becoming life-long learners is more valuable than any information or skills we could asses. We know the world is changing so fast that we can't guess what our students will need to know in the future.
Even slumped heavily behind our screens looking for any way to engage students through videos and zoom rooms mid-pandemic, we've known that teaching for a modern world requires an innovative mindset. Beyond any fleeting trend or fad, modern education is moving, as a whole, towards a future that is more student-focused, more inquiry-based, and more competency-focused than ever before.
This leaves us with a value-action gap between the ideal of what modern teaching and learning should be, and the tools we're still lacking to actually make it happen. There's still no clear consensus on what the necessary skills and competencies are, their progressions, how to teach them, or their effect on our students' futures. At a meta-level, this shift in philosophy is still just superficial until it is fleshed out in tangible, accessible resources for teachers and students.
Tired teachers can't always be expected to perpetually redesign their lessons between lunch duty and sports supervision - or whatever numerous extras we've overcommitted to this year. Teachers should invest time and energy into building relationships and environments where good, inspiring learning can happen, and they should have the materials required to align that learning with the needs of students in a modern world. Valuable teaching will not happen consistently until resources are available that make it easy and time-effective for teachers to facilitate that learning.
At Worth Teaching we'd like to help bridge that gap, specifically in the area of intercultural communication, global competence and global citizenship education.
Our Guiding question is:
What competencies do students need in order to collaborate across cultures to solve world problems?
We're focused on applying the theory about what's worth teaching, to make concrete, easy-to-use resources available for classrooms:
both for distinct, short courses related to global citizenship,
and for resources that integrate a global lens into traditional subject areas.
Want to help us bridge that gap? Reach out to us here, and stay connected by receiving our newsletter.
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