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Chapter 2

KEY PRINCIPLES FOR MODERN SCHOOLING

by Ted McCain

The problem with our schools is not that they are not what they used to be, but they are what they used to be.

—Education Commission of the States

When we think about modern education and what students will need from their learning to be prepared for their future, there are certain things that we know: We know that technological innovation drives the world, we know that we need a significant shift in focus to help students attain the skills they require for success in the modern world, and we know that effective school design is based on what effective instruction looks like. Given these things, the next important question is: What are the key attributes of effective 21st century instruction? By identifying those attributes, we come to a subsequent question: How do we reorganize schools to make them serve that kind of learning?

To answer these questions, we look at two reasons why technology makes school change necessary—(1) how it is changing our lives and (2) how it is changing how students learn—and then focus on four principles that must form the new foundation for how we provide effective instruction for students who require much different preparation than those of us raised on 20th century learning. Those four principles are:

1. Establishing a focus on individuals

2. Building flexibility into everything we do as educators

3. Rethinking how we use school time

4. Focusing on developing students’ higher-level-thinking skills

We start by examining how modern technology affects our lives.

Technology Transforms Lives

It’s easy for those of us raised in the 20th century to think of the myriad ways technology has changed the world. However, the long-term impacts of technological development on how we live are only just beginning to come into focus. Like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pond, the effects of technological change are growing as time goes on, and these changes will continue to have an astounding impact on our daily lives. No one will be exempt from the effect of these changes. To give you an idea of what we will see very soon, the following is a description of life in the future by Kevin Kelly (2016), a founding executive editor of Wired magazine:

It’s 2046. You don’t own a car, or much of anything else, paying instead to subscribe to items as you need them. Virtual reality is as commonplace as cell phones. You talk to your devices with a common set of hand gestures. Practically all surfaces have become a screen, and each screen watches you back. Every aspect of your daily life is tracked by you or someone else. Advertisers pay you to watch their ads. Robots and AI (artificial intelligence) took over your old job, but also created a new one for you, doing work you could not have imagined back in 2016. (Jacket cover)

Many of us who have been around for a while think we’ve already seen all the upheaval technology is going to throw at us, but the changes still to come will be very different than anything we have ever experienced. Indeed, changes like the ones Kelly (2016) describes stretch our ability to comprehend them.

Incredibly, despite these enormous changes that we know are coming, many educators don’t think they will significantly affect the way schools operate. In our observations, the modern school system’s amazing stability fosters a belief in educators that we will just continue to teach students the way we have always taught students. Many in education believe that although we will continue to deploy and use new technology, the basic approach to instruction, the basic organization of schools, and the basic arrangement of the physical spaces in school buildings will remain essentially as they were in the 21st century. We disagree. These waves of change will become so massive that education will no longer be immune to the technology-driven changes that will sweep over the rest of the modern world.

To help you grasp the magnitude of what education will face, we identify four major aspects of technological change that will transform education: (1) technological change is accelerating, (2) hyperinformation is transforming knowledge, (3) mobile technology is transforming access to knowledge, and (4) smart technology is transforming the teacher’s role. In the following sections, we examine each aspect.

Technological Change Is Accelerating

The world has always been an evolving work in progress. But a hallmark of the transition from the late 20th century to the early 21st century is a new kind of change—technology-driven exponential change. This is change that develops at an astonishing speed, much more quickly than linear change. What this means is that the power of new technology is increasing much more dramatically than anything we have previously experienced (Berman & Dorrier, 2016).

The implications of exponential change, and how the changes to come will affect students’ lives, are staggering. For example, exponential development of artificial intelligence makes the arrival of fully intelligent personal assistants foreseeable in the next ten to fifteen years. These assistants will be capable of natural voice interaction, able to learn from experience, and proficient at accessing all the knowledge on the internet. These smart digital personalities will provide young people with personal assistants that will monitor their schedules, interact with others on their behalf, become “friends” that accompany them everywhere, and be powerful tutors that can teach them on every topic imaginable.

Ironically, the human mind’s ability to cope with new developments like these actually hinders its ability to comprehend the magnitude of technological change as it is happening (The Mind Tools Content Team, n.d.; Yamamoto, 2011). This is an important point. When most people think about the future, they naturally make a linear projection of steady change because this kind of vision for progress is much more manageable for people to deal with. But because the world is experiencing exponential change (change that is accelerating), linear projections greatly underestimate the magnitude of change that we will actually see. Exponential projections, like those in the Kelly (2016) quote or those we present in chapter 4 (page 39), often seem too incredible to believe, but in times of exponential change, you must resist the temptation to look at a projected development and say, “That will never happen!” The truth is that when we look at technology through the lens of exponential change, we quickly see that developments that were once thought of as pure science fiction quickly become reality.

Hyperinformation Is Transforming Knowledge

Hyperinformation is the term Ted uses to describe the new ways technology allows us to experience information. First, the internet provides the average person access to an incredible amount of information, much more than any individual has ever had access to. Second, technology makes it easier to find the specific data we desire. However, technology is doing more than transforming the way we get information. It is also transforming the kind of information we get. Instead of just reading traditional text-based information, we can read, see, hear, and touch new digital forms of data. Games and simulations allow us to have virtual experiences like riding on a satellite, seeing inside an atom, watching chemical reactions, and walking beside prehistoric animals. Hyperinformation applies to all these types of information and the sheer volume of it. Access to hyperinformation allows us to move beyond the second-hand experiences of reading about events, places, products, processes, and stories to experiencing them in a way that is, for all practical intents and purposes, firsthand.

Mobile Technology Is Transforming Access to Knowledge

Schools have always been places where experts pass on their knowledge and skills to students. Libraries have long been repositories of a wide array of learning materials. Throughout history, people have physically gone to schools or libraries when they needed to learn something (Andrews, 2016). However, online mobile technology is changing the notion that learning is tied to a physical location. Mobile technology frees learning from the confines of schools and libraries because people can learn wherever they are, whenever they need new information or they need to develop a new skill. We foresee that as the power of connected, mobile technology expands, educators will find it increasingly challenging to adapt the way they teach students. It will be critical that teachers embrace the idea that learning will increasingly happen outside the school building and beyond normal school hours (Richmond, 2015).

Having easy access to knowledge from anywhere is also changing the kinds of skills that people need to succeed in life. Historically, schools have emphasized memorization. Being educated has long been associated with what you know. But when students have access to the totality of human knowledge via an internet-connected, handheld device (a volume of data that no person can memorize), they must understand how to use those data and determine what are useful and valid from what are not. These are the sorts of higher-level-thinking skills (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) that empower students to do productive things with the information they find, and we write more on these skills in chapter 3 (page 29).

Smart Technology Is Transforming the Teacher’s Role

Smart technology already surrounds us wherever we go. However, it’s important to understand just what we mean when we refer to smart technology. From cars with driver-assist features, to digital assistants that listen and talk (think Google Home), to the robots that build things, smart machines are a part of our everyday lives. However, we are only just beginning to see the emergence of truly intelligent machines. The cognitive ability of digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri is an indication of where things are headed, and where they are headed is a game changer.

Rapidly, technology platforms are becoming capable of performing many cognitive functions humans do (Gillies, 2017; IBM, n.d.; UBS, n.d.). We will soon interact with smart, digital personalities as naturally as we interact with real people. This intelligent technology will process our requests, retrieve desired information, and perform a multitude of daily tasks for us. Smart machines will also anticipate our needs and do things for us before we even think of asking.

Educators are not going to be exempt from the effects of this new smart technology. We are going to have to deal with the reality that intelligent technology will very soon be capable of performing many tasks that teachers currently do. This does not mean that teachers will lose their jobs. Instead, it means that teachers will have to embrace new roles in instruction (Ostdick, 2016). This is actually a good thing. Smart technology holds the potential to relieve teachers of the drudgery of performing lower-level-information-dissemination tasks in instruction (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). This frees them to focus on the much more challenging and rewarding higher-level tasks of teaching critical thinking and creativity as well as the emotionally complex tasks involved in helping students mature.

Technology Changes How Students Learn

It’s not just a question of how quickly the change of pace is accelerating or how easy it is to access knowledge. The kinds of change we write about in this chapter are not neutral—they profoundly impact people. Technology integration into daily living affects people at fundamental levels, especially children (Bowman, 2017). It changes how they live their lives, the way they expect others to treat them, even the way they think and the things they value. Although technology affects everyone to some degree, it most affects those who are born into it. Students in the digital generations have no experience with the way previous generations did things. Access to hyperinformation is simply what they experience and expect, and they run with it. It even changes how students think and absorb information in fundamental ways. Two important changes educators must consider when contemplating education’s future include how social networking changes life experiences and how technology affects the way students learn.

How Social Networking Changes Life Experiences

Students are always on their phones and other digital devices. They use them to talk with their friends, but they use them for much more than that. They are sharing audiovisual information like sound recordings and videos shot on their phones, YouTube videos, and music files. They are also sharing textual information in text messages, email, personal writings, poems, and research for school projects. They are using their digital devices to compete and collaborate in online games and simulations. They also use social-networking technology to connect with subject-matter experts who give them instruction on topics of interest. In short, social-networking technology is not just a medium for idle chatting and posting, but a means to eliminate the barriers of distance and language that stand between people and knowledge. Friends can be sitting a few desks away in the same classroom, or they can be anywhere else around the world. We have personally witnessed students in classrooms partnering with peers from around the globe on group learning projects.

For the digital generations, there is no practical difference between the lives they live in the physical world and the lives they live while online (Palfrey & Gasser, 2010). It’s all part of the same tapestry. They live in a physical world and have normal face-to-face relationships, but they also participate in a digital online culture where they have virtual relationships that augment face-to-face interactions, as well as virtual relationships that take place completely in the online world. The digital generations are as comfortable with online relationships as they are with face-to-face relationships.

How Technology Affects the Way Students Learn

Anyone who works with students in the digital generations is aware that there is something different about the way they learn. There is sound empirical research that confirms that these young people are cognitively different from older generations. A number of books, including Growing Up Digital (Tapscott, 2000), Grown Up Digital (Tapscott, 2008), Born Digital (Palfrey & Gasser, 2016), Understanding the Digital Generation (Jukes, McCain, & Crockett, 2010), and Rewired (Rosen, 2010), are telling us that the fast-paced bombardment of text, color, images, and sound that young people experience in the digital online world from a very young age alters the way their brains process information. Twenty-first century students are using different parts of their brains to process information than their parents and teachers. They are visual learners. In addition, information on the internet is often broken into bite-sized chunks to make it quicker and easier to consume. Ted observes that a steady diet of these information nuggets has led to a much shorter attention span in modern digital students. Further, social networking has created an online environment where learning is often a very social experience. Add all of this up, and you see that the digital generations are actually thinking and learning differently than previous generations. It is important for parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians to recognize that modern students have a much different way of learning than adults raised in a nondigital world.

The following list of some of the major attributes and expectations we observe in digital students puts this into perspective.

• They use technology as an essential tool to connect to their culture; using mobile, internet-connected devices like cell phones is not optional for the digital generations.

• They expect immediate access to up-to-date information whenever they need it.

• They are used to immediate feedback (from video games and online experiences).

• They read text only as a last resort and usually receive information in visual, auditory, or multimedia formats.

• They expect to be connected to friends all the time, with relationships and collaborations that comprise a mix of online and face-to-face interactions.

• They turn to online sources to learn new skills or acquire new information and expect those services to tailor themselves to their individual wants and needs.

• They have a much more open concept of privacy and are more comfortable with intelligent, autonomous technology than generations raised in the 20th century.

• They multitask on several simultaneous online interactions while they go about daily tasks.

The students entering schools present the adults who are in control of the school system with a significant problem—many adults can’t relate to the world of the digital generations. We have witnessed in many schools, school districts, and states and provinces that neither teachers, administrators, parents, school district staff, school board members, people at the department of education, nor state or provincial politicians raised in the 20th century have any real long-term exposure to the technologically infused life experience of the students who populate our schools. There are, of course, younger teachers entering the teaching profession that have grown up in the modern, networked, digital environment, and these new colleagues bring hope for the future as they work their way into the ranks of teachers, administrators, and school district staff. However, we will not feel their most significant impacts on schooling for some time.

The core truth is that the majority of the adults responsible for teaching young people are out of touch with their students. This is a huge issue of relevancy for education. Unless teachers make it a priority to understand the world their students experience outside school, the instructional methods and examples that teachers use are almost certain to miss the mark. We believe this is a huge impediment to effective communication and to engaging learning, but we do offer solutions in the following sections to help bridge this gap.

Focus on Individuals

We have many years of research that tell us what really works and what doesn’t work in terms of maximizing learning in young minds (Battro, Fischer, & Léna, 2008; Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2010). This research invalidates many of the assumptions that constitute the assembly-line foundation for how we organize most schools. The cognitive development of human beings simply does not fit into nice, neat organizational structures. Although these assumptions might have made sense from a business perspective, from a human-instruction perspective, organizational structures like grades designated by age and classrooms filled with twenty-five to thirty students for mass instruction are counterproductive at best and boring, oppressive, and damaging to individual students at worst. Trying to apply production-efficiency strategies to schools may produce efficient organizational structures, but it doesn’t create an instructional environment that can handle the wide range of unique individuals that policy mandates schools teach.

In his book Brain Rules, John Medina (2014) writes about the disconnect between how the brains of students develop and the way schools are organized:

The current system is founded on a series of expectations that certain learning goals should be achieved by a certain age. Yet there is no reason to suspect that the brain pays attention to those expectations. Students at the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability. These differences can profoundly influence classroom performance. This has been tested…. Lockstep models based simply on age are guaranteed to create a counterproductive mismatch to brain biology. (p. 67)

However, despite Medina’s (2014) and other brain researchers’ work to identify its flaws, a lockstep model for organizing schools is what we continue to have in education (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Jensen, 2005; Sousa, 2011). The question is, if we are not going to organize schools around grades and classrooms, then what should take their place? Listen again to what Medina’s (2014) research has to say on this subject:

You cannot change the fact that the human brain is individually wired. Every student’s brain … is wired differently. That’s the brain rule. You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education chooses the latter, to our detriment. It needs to be torn down and newly envisioned … in a commitment to individualizing instruction. (p. 51)

What Medina (2014) is saying here is incredibly important. We should design schools to enable individualized instruction that meets each student’s unique needs. At this point, we should note that educators have wanted to create individualized instruction for a long time, but the logistics of making that happen in the school system prevented large-scale individualized instruction.

Fortunately, technology excels at providing tools for customizing services for individuals. Consider the way 21st century businesses can target individuals with goods and services tailored to their personal needs then reflect on how educators could take advantage of those same technologies to better customize mass learning. For example, if you’ve ever browsed or purchased something at Amazon (www.amazon.com), you notice the company’s website algorithms immediately begin to bring similar products to your attention (Amazon.com, n.d.). The more you use the site, the more information the site gathers about your preferences. Using that information, Amazon customizes your shopping experience to match your personal profile.

The way Amazon compiles and analyzes personal profiles to create a unique shopping experience for customers is part of something called big data. Big data refer to the use of advanced data analytics to extract value from the information it stores in a database (“Big data,” n.d.). Amazon uses big-data analytics to determine individual user preferences (among other things), and it’s not the only company using big data to create experiences customized to individuals. Facebook uses big-data profiles to determine how to organize each user’s news feeds to reflect his or her interests. YouTube uses big-data profiles to suggest videos that will be of interest to particular people. There are many more (DeZyre, 2015). Big data are already well-established, and the ways companies use them will continue to grow and improve in the future. But consider for a moment how we can productively apply these concepts to education.

Big-data analytics can also enhance learning experiences for individual students who attend their schools. By compiling personal learning profiles, preferences, and progress for individual students, we believe school districts will be able to finally break free of William Wirt’s 1908 lock-step approach to instruction. Big data will be a key to allowing students to progress at their own rate through school curriculum as well as the key to providing meaningful, automated, and personalized remedial instruction.

It is important to note that school systems will not be the only ones targeting young people with customized, personal educational programs. Already we see private companies offering instruction to students. The long-standing, entrenched approach to instruction that is prevalent in the school system doesn’t encumber these companies (Herold, 2016).

Consequently, they are able to incorporate strategies for customized, personal instruction much more quickly than traditional schools. We believe this necessitates a significant shift in the attitude schools have toward students. Instead of viewing students as those the law compels to attend school, we must begin to see our students as clients who have many instructional options and whom we must engage with interesting instruction that prepares them for the world they will face outside school.

Beyond just big-data collection, an important component of reorganizing schools around individual students will be ensuring that schools provide one-on-one time between a student and a teacher. Educational experts have known for some time that a meaningful relationship with a caring adult is an important factor in students’ success in school (Boynton & Boynton, 2005). The key is to create an organizational structure that facilitates this relationship and to allot sufficient time for the adult to get to know each student as a unique individual.

Build Flexibility Into Everything

In an environment of constant and accelerating change, how do you develop effective instructional methods? How do you design or modify school facilities so they will continue to be effective over their entire life span? The answer is flexibility. Educators at all levels must include flexibility as a planned component in everything they do. Since conventional school spaces are not built for flexibility, this means we must embrace a major shift in thinking about how we configure spaces for learning.

It’s critical for all educators and stakeholders to keep in mind that it is their job to prepare students to succeed in environments that don’t exist yet, in jobs no one has thought of yet, doing tasks no one has imagined yet, using technology no one has invented yet. How can you provide instruction that is flexible enough to equip students for the huge range of future possibilities that await them? We believe the key is to teach students processes, because a process-focused approach is the best way to future-proof our students.

The best way to understand a process-focused instructional approach is to compare it to the content-focused approach educators traditionally use. Content-focused approaches focus on memorization and information recall, which are concepts we discussed previously in this chapter (Technology Transforms Lives, page 18). Because it is simply not possible to memorize the enormous volume of new and changing informational content the modern world produces, what students need from educators is to learn an effective process for finding information and assessing the credibility and relevance of the information they find. From there, students can effectively use those resources to educate themselves with what they need to know in the moment. Process skills, many of which we discuss throughout chapter 3 (page 29), empower students to function in life because these skills remain the same even as the world changes.

Rethink How We Use Time

There is an old saying in education that if time is the constant, then learning is the variable. It means that if a course runs for a fixed length of time, not all students will have learned the same amount when the course is over. This has been an underlying foundation to the instructional approach in the school system for a very long time. It is an approach that virtually all of us experienced growing up, and most students still experience this approach in schools. Courses run for a fixed period—a year-long term or a four- or five-month semester. When students finish a course, teachers assess how well they learned the curriculum. Those who excel receive As, those who display genuine proficiency receive Bs, and so on down the line. Learning varies from student to student, and educators view failure as an accepted outcome for those who could not learn enough in the time allotted. Those who fail have to repeat the entire grade or course, often with the same teacher using the same instructional approach that contributed to the failure in the first place.

But what would happen if we inverted the old saying? What would schools look like if learning was the constant and time was the variable? How would we have to adjust our instruction if the focus shifted from teaching for a fixed period to continuous learning for students? It turns out that this one change to the way learning occurs changes for the better almost everything we do in schools.

Reconsider our elements of schooling diagram (figure page 3) and its six elements that support learning. When you start making changes to the use of time, you drastically change all the other elements as well. For example, if we allow teachers to make learning the constant and time the variable then we must allow for students to progress through course material at their own pace. Such a change has significant ramifications for the way teachers teach. It’s much harder for teachers to stand in front of a class and talk about some aspect of a curriculum because not all students will be ready for that instruction at the same time. This means shifting instruction away from talking to whole classes and focusing more on discussions with individual students or small student groups. The teacher’s role changes from being the sage on the stage, who talks to students to pass on his or her knowledge to them, to the guide on the side, who advises them on the best learning strategies and digital tools to assist students with mastering course material.

Since mastery of course material is necessary for students to progress in a school where learning is the constant, failure is no longer a part of student evaluation. Students either master part of their required learning or continue working toward mastery. Assessment of learning can shift from norm-referenced evaluation (grading A to F) to criterion-referenced assessment that uses rubrics to measure the degree to which students master course material. Using criterion-referenced assessment, the goal shifts from rating and ranking students according to their level of learning over a fixed period to all students mastering course material before they progress to new learning tasks. Although this kind of assessment may be new to many parents and teachers, it is not just an academic theory. For example, Ted has seen how schools in British Columbia, Canada, have made a significant shift in the way they evaluate students by moving away from letter grades. In these systems, reports to parents reference the evaluation criteria and are much more anecdotal in nature.

Schools will also rely more on technology for instruction because technology provides the much-needed framework for students to access course content whenever they are ready for it. This means not only delivering content when students need it but also integrating those features with analytics that record, track, and analyze student progress. This frees teachers from much of the burden of simple information dissemination, allowing them to monitor student progress and focus instruction on creating the higher-level-thinking tasks that get students doing something useful with the knowledge they acquire. It also comes with the side benefit of making it easier for parents to see and participate in their child’s progress.

Such systems can help teachers identify which students are at the same point in a course and facilitate scheduling group activities. However, students in a continuous-progress learning environment take different amounts of time to reach a particular point in a curriculum, unlike students in a traditional school, where all students receive the same amount of time for learning course material. Consequently, when a language arts teacher schedules a seminar for a group discussion on the privacy and individual rights following a student reading of 1984 (Orwell, 1949), the group may consist of two seventeen-year-olds, five sixteen-year-olds, three fourteen-year-olds, and a precocious twelve-year-old.

This kind of change in the way educators focus school time has far-reaching implications for how schools operate. For example, once students begin to progress at their own pace, some will complete certain academic coursework before reaching the typical age for graduating into postsecondary study. School districts may establish partnerships with postsecondary institutions for students to continue their studies while they are still in high school. For students who complete certain courses in career-oriented programs, school districts may establish certified apprenticeship programs so students can begin some of their postsecondary work while they are still enrolled in high school (as many have done already).

Throughout the rest of this book, we write in more detail about achieving this kind of learning and how increased technology use and getting rid of classrooms facilitate this change.

Develop Higher-Level-Thinking Skills

From our work with many educators in North America and beyond, it is clear most educators say that high on their list of instructional goals is to develop students’ higher-level-thinking skills (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). However, the reality in most classrooms, especially in high school, is that there continues to be an emphasis on rote content memorization and regurgitation. This situation is understandable. Virtually all teachers experienced teaching with a low-level memorization focus when they were students themselves. It is completely natural for teachers to teach the way they were taught. In addition, the move toward learning standards and standardized testing produced a major focus on content and low-level procedure memorization to improve test scores (Harris, Smith, & Harris, 2011).

Consequently, many teachers feel their job is done when they convey the information in a course curriculum and then test to see how well their students can remember it. This focus on lower-level-thinking skills then becomes a ceiling for what teachers do instructionally, and they do not often go above it (Towler, 2014). Learning suffers as a result.

However, there has been a significant shift in the kinds of thinking skills people need to be successful in the 21st century world. What has become more important is what you do with the information you retrieve using technology to solve problems while working with others. Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, underscores this point when she writes, “In 1970, the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three R’s: reading, writing and arithmetic” (as cited in Davis, 2013).

In 2018, the Opportunity Network (n.d.) names communication skills, teamwork, and analytical and problem-solving skills as the top three skills in demand. Given this, teachers and students alike must see learning a topic’s details as providing the base for further analysis, conversation, and debate. Students must be able to rethink their assumptions in order to solve problems, form opinions, make arguments, create effective vehicles for communication, or innovate new ways of doing things. To effectively perform these tasks requires that students have higher-level information processing, problem-solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity skills. In other words, learning the specific details in a curriculum creates the floor on which high-level thought stands. We write about these skills in detail in the next chapter.

Essential Questions

As you reflect on this chapter, consider the following questions.

• How are the changes in the modern world currently reflected in your school?

• Knowing that the world is experiencing technologically driven exponential change, how can you adjust your thinking about what the future will bring?

• What steps can you take to stay current on what is happening in the world for which you are preparing your students?

• What are the implications of hyperinformation on what and how we teach students?

• Given that students are fundamentally different, how should you change how you deliver instruction?

• How can you modify instruction and learning spaces in your school to flexibly meet students’ individual needs?

• What implications do the principles this chapter outlines have for effective teaching and learning in the modern world?

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