Ever since I can remember, school has been about WHAT students will learn. As educators we meticulously pour over content standards and frameworks, agonize over test scores, and implore students to memorize content. We believe what we have learned ourselves – namely that what is in the textbook and on the test, is what students need to know to be successful. We consider it a direct correlation: The more students know, the better prepared they will be for their future. So, we drill and kill, we test, and we repeat. It worked for us, so it must work for these kids too. The problem, of course, is that our past experience is not the same as our students’ future.
I remember being in elementary school and looking forward to the one day a week that we would go to the computer lab. We would power up the apple behemoth, play a little Oregon Trail, and then head back to class. It was glorious. Back then, spending an hour each week playing a computer game was about all the time I would spend on a computer. My dad had one for work, but as far as I was concerned, it was pointless. It didn’t have Oregon Trail. Back then, we really did need to know stuff. As a kids growing up in the 80’s, we learned quickly that if you didn’t know something, you basically had two choices: (1) ask an adult; (2) go to the library and look in the encyclopedia. In many ways, it was no different that the Middle Ages. Those who possessed the knowledge would bestow that knowledge on the learner, who was expected to copy and memorize what they were told. And you better make sure you wrote it in cursive.
And then the internet happened.
For better or worse, our kids will grow up in a technology saturated world. They have the sum of all human knowledge available at their fingertips. If you want to know something, you can easily “google” it, or ask “Alexa.” Need to know who shot Abraham Lincoln? Google it. Need to know how many ounces are in a liter? Google it. Want to know what 9×9 is? Just ask Alexa.
As Will Richardson notes in his book Freedom to Learn:
We tell [students] to put their amazingly huge online libraries away and focus only on the comparatively tiny slice of content and skills that we’ve preselected for them, just the stuff that we can fit into our one-thousand-hour-a-year curriculum, and we expect them to be OK with that.
Our emphasis on “knowing” has become both an impoverished view of student learning, as well as a misguided one. We demand that students “turn-off” all of the learning that they might do, in order to focus on what they must do. Worse still, our focused standards represent only our current best guess as to what students will need to know in the future; a viewpoint even more ironic considering that we, as adult educators, likely remember precious little of what we “learned” in school.
I will be the first to acknowledge that content standards and assessments are important parts of the educational process. However, they are also so engrained in our system, and our own personal experiences as both educators and students, that they hardly need to be emphasized. They are the foundation for our pacing guides, our adopted curriculum, our aligned lessons, and most of what we teach in the classroom. When I say that I ‘don’t care what students learn,’ I’m of course being somewhat facetious. Standards matter, perhaps now more than ever.
But that is also why I think it is so critical for us to fix our focus firmly on HOW students learn. We need to invest our time and energy not into greater alignment with content standards (is that even possible?), but into the skills and dispositions that will help students navigate a rapidly changing world. We need to focus on giving them opportunities to identify, and creatively solve real-world problems. We need to turn them loose to explore complicated topics like AI, coding and programming, social media, and a whole host of other technology focused sectors that will dominate their futures. We need to give students the opportunity to collaborate with people in their class and around the world. We need to leverage technology to connect our students with experts and advocates. We need to let students learn the way they do when they are not at school – in a connected, relevant, passion-driven way.
In the end, we need to care far more about HOW our kids are learning. We’ve spent the last 100+ years fine-tuning WHAT they are learning about. Isn’t’ it about time that we started considering the HOW and Why of student learning? That, I believe, will truly be the key to a successful and fulfilled life.
A.Nelson 