Learning Conversations

Link: http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/the-steep-unlearning-curve/

Will Richardson always brings something into the mix that makes you think. In this post on the steep unlearning curve that we (as educators - and as society) must undergo, Will describes a number of the things we need to unlearn in order to "see the possibilities before us".

These are some of the things he has suggested - with a bit of commentary from me.

We need to unlearn the idea that we are the sole content experts in the classroom, because we can now connect our kids to people who know far more than we do about the material we’re teaching.

It's a case of us, as educators, moving out of our comfort zone and returning to a state of constant discomfort (=learning)

We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in many cases, they can now be our teachers as well.

Yet I can just see the headlines: "What are we paying our teachers for?" How do we get the message across to a society that believes it knows everything about education?

We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.

Tell that to the people leading the assessment practices. No matter how much we dislike it - assessment drives "formal" learning. All the time assessment is content focussed, time delimited and reliant on what you can remember very little will change.

We need to unlearn the strategy that collaborative work inside the classroom is enough and understand that cooperating with students from around the globe can teach relevant and powerful negotiation and team-building skills.

You could argue that we should just let the kids find their particular communities of practice and then work out which transferable skills are being demonstrated. That would answer the assessment problem. I'm not sure it would answer those people that say everyone needs to have studied Shakespeare's 1st sonnet (not that I know what a sonnet is - my school - a UK grammar school didn't do English Lit - at least not in the 80's!)

We need to unlearn the idea that every student needs to learn the same content when really what they need to learn is how to self-direct their own learning.

Learning how to learn is the absolute critical skill for everyone, I agree. But how do we then give every child the opportunity to explore whether they should take a particular field of learning further, eg. Science, or even Latin? How can we help universities understand that the people coming to them won't necessarily know much about their subject - but they know how to learn?

We need to unlearn the notion that our students don’t need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.

There's a lot of negatives in there. Are you saying that teachers need to be open about their own learning? If so, I agree totally - but where do we start? And also, there isn't the capacity in the fixed curricula we have (certainly in the UK) to cope with teachers that are continually learning and wanting to try new things. Perhaps we need to take an approach to education that let's people learn from those who are just slightly further on than they are - with the teacher being the person that provides a sense of direction? (Just thinking aloud here really)

We need to unlearn the practice that teaches all students at the same pace. Is it any wonder why so many of our students love to play online games where they move forward at their own pace?

Yes - this is partly what the recent DfES report on 2020 schooling appears to be saying. I'd be interested to get your ideas on what your ideal "school" looks like: how is it organised? Where do things happen? Who does what, when?

We need to unlearn the idea that we can teach our students to be literate in this world by continually blocking and filtering access to the sites and experiences they need our help to navigate.

Yes, it's similar to being streetwise - but the online streets are so new that parents and teachers are struggling to keep up with what it means to be streetwise in this environment.

We need to unlearn the premise that real change can happen just by rethinking what happens inside the school walls and understand that education is now a community undertaking on many different levels.

That takes me back to a white paper I wrote some years ago:

"When communication via the internet is brought in to a school then, automatically, the physical and temporal walls of the classroom have been broken down. Students and teachers will have access to each other regardless of physical or temporal location. Teachers and learners now have the choice of two environments in which learning may take place, the real and the virtual. It will be up to the teacher to learn how to make most effective use of both those environments, which may mean changing the way the classroom is used because it is not the most appropriate environment for certain learning activities."

But things have moved on even more than that. The learning platform then was still about one school. These days the network is far wider than just one school, one district, or even one country. Just imagine, if schools really understood the power of the network and the many and varied learning experiences available through it. The trouble I'm having is making that picture concrete - working out what it means in practice...