Sunday, May 7, 2017

Food for Thought: Sir Ken Robinson at EduLead

Dear all,

This will be my last post arising from the INTASE EduLead conference on Reinventing Schools. Sir Ken Robinson spoke to us live from LA where he now lives for nearly three hours. He was totally engaging and humorous as always. As last week's post was quite long I have decided to try and give you just the key points that Sir K shared with us grading the need to revolutionize education and create a culture of innovation in our schools. What he had to say is not far from where we are as a school and non of it was alien to our thinking.

  • Sir Ken explained that many of the reforms that government are introducing are going in the wrong direction. He argued that the direction of standardization and testing is stifling the skills that students need most for the 21st century. 
  • We are living in revolutionary times. We have never faced such rapid changes caused by technology and never had a global population over 7 billion people. Both of these factors will create incredible challenge and change that can only be answered by having schools that encourage creativity and innovation.
  • "Life you end up living is the talents you uncover and your experiences. Everyone has a unique bio. These human resources need to be discovered, then refined and developed from capacity to ability by schools. To do this schools need to think differently about the resources they have at their disposal." 
  • Have to change the systems that govern schools. A school's system are based around economic reasoning such as efficiency, organization and cost but having nothing to do with student learning or their preparation for the modern world. He made an analogy, shoes are important for walking outside but if the shoe doesn't fit anymore why keep polishing it in the hope that the pain will go away.
  • Where governments are going                 against              Where we need to be going
           Conformity                                                   v                   Diversity
           Compliance                                                  v                   Skills demanded by the economy
           Linear view of life                                        v                   Organic development
  • Learning is a natural process for humans, acquiring skills and understanding. Children love to learn. Much that we learn isn't taught, it is because we have the capacity and are interested. Education is an organized programme of learning. The problem isn't with the concept of learning it is with the education system that frames it.
  • There is a need for more play in education. Sir K made the point that in a recent survey of 12,000 schools they found that children today were on average only allowed 1 hour of play per day. This is less than half that allowed to high security prisoners in the USA who receive 2 hours per day.
  • If we had a blank sheet to recreate schools there would be many things that would be replaced but one that would would be teachers. Education is all about the relationship between the teacher and the students. Standards are necessary but not sufficient. It is the teacher that brings learning alive so it is important that schools encourage teachers to come alive.
Sir Ken then talked about what education enable students to engage or become:
  • economically independent. There needs to be a greater focus on social and emotional skills eg. collaboration, creativity, social work and team work.
  • understand and appreciate their own culture and to respect the diversity of other cultures
  • active and compassionate citizens
  • with the world within them and the world beyond them
  • able to imagine the future
  • able to create and make their imagination into a reality
  • innovators by celebrating new ideas and having a culture where these are developed.
Sir Ken concluded in his question and answers referred to the idea of singularity as being a major reason why education HAS TO BE REVOLUTIONIZED. He referred to machines becoming conscious, having independent agency. He asked the question if machine have consciousness should thy have rights? We are not far way from having to make decisions whether we can discriminate between our natural world or that of machines. This raised the question that machines will take over our world because of their ability to exponentially change the world and we have no idea what this world will look like. Hence, education needs to be far more about personalization of learning, producing students who are creative, innovators, resilient, able to transfer skills and knowledge and see problems as opportunities.

Have a good afternoon,

Yours
Adrian


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