Silly Silos Sustains Silly Singular Thinking

The previous post began the conversation re the P21 framework.

I endorse their efforts and their prodigious thinking about the model they have developed.

But I feel constrained to throw up a caution flag for the casual reader both here in this blog forum and in their review of the P21 framework. If you look at their framework too quickly you may see the trees but not the forest.

I’d pose that the content areas I spoke to previously can easily become silos. Remember silos are merely holding tubes, CONTAINERS / Restrictors of their own nature so what they hold does not spill out where one doesn’t want it

While the formal object of each content area validly has facts and skills that are properly the “domain” of the subject for sure, you have to be careful to limit your mindset through those tubes.

The real value for the 21st century student may be both in receiving instruction in and in mastering some basics appropriate to that subject, but the deeper value lies in the interdisciplinary cross-hatch between and among subjects.

In the old days we called this interdisciplinary instruction and learning. However and I will produce research research to support this, so much of this noble experiment has gone by the boards as the practices and the organizational structures put in place to effect interdisciplinary instruction have withered and eroded for at least two reasons, maybe more;

- teacher designers didn’t teach teacher candidates and teachers how to develop effective interdisciplinary lessons;

- the structure of an ordinary day in elementary or in secondary schools just doesn’t support this kind of teaching. Sometimes you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole;

- the structures weren’t put in place because administrators either didn’t have the expertise to make the premise work or did not feel that it was important in the first place;

- and of course, of course, we throw in the age old mantra of ” I / we have to get kids ready for examinations and assessments that don’t lend themselves to this kind of learning.

This last point is real but less real if there is such a thing as less-real, because both the test makers and the test-givers are missing the P21 point in the first place.

Today’s and tomorrow’s learners can’t afford to think in terms of single subject areas (unless of course they become teachers of single subjects themselves:) ). They will need to be thinkers; critical thinkers; creative thinkers; thoughtful decision-makers.

That kind of learning requires the literacies that P21 advocate and it requires us to think like Bruner thinks; i.e. how or to what extent content promotes process learning and how and to what extent process learning promotes content mastery.

Next post will elaborate.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

An earlier post asked what sort of future we imagine awaits our future citizens. And if we could identify enough of said future we could then shape an education system that would best align with it.

I will leave the conversation about what is forecast as a repeating thread in succeeding posts. I will point out that a group of respected thinkers and educators have developed an interesting set of frameworks that we can use for real analysis.

What I think makes most sense of what they offer is the recognition that edufuturists will not be responsible for creating structures to perpetuate content for content’s sake. Instead the future will require that learners practice competency sets of various literacies whose mastery will enable future learners to be prepared to not only meet future needs but proactively create futures we all will prefer.

This organization is The Partnership for 21st Century Skills. We will spend considerable time parsing their thinking and assessing what they offer.

Please take a look at http://www.p21.org/

About

As you will quickly draw from the posts that have and will accumulate I am an educator. For over forty-two years I have “toiled” in the trenches as a social studies teacher, teacher and coordinator of gifted and talented programs, curriculum specialist, dean of students, Director of Pupil Personnel, Principal, Director of Humanities, and Assistant Superintendent for Educational Services.

Sprinkled in and among these jobs, were several educational publications, simulations and curriculum guides. Along the way I became involved in Higher Education too; as an adjunct professor, full professor, and Assistant Dean for the largest School of Education on Long Island.

Sprinkled among both sets of careers ; is a pretty full set of consulting and presentation activities about simulation design, technology embedded instruction, systems thinking and shared planning, and organizational development. The threads that knit the fabric are simple but deceptively complex. On the one hand, I’ve always believed that as teacher / professor / presenter I was morally obligated to highly involve my students / participants in helping me make sense and meaning of the content or skills – set at hand. That meant I had to create highly involving strategies to engage the learner. But that also meant that I needed the training, and the time, and the resources to be creative and effective.

That meant that I needed educational leaders to create systems for me to flourish. I quickly realized that that was easier to say than it was to do and as I began to peel back the onion I also realized that the systems and the structures intended to help me and other teachers of like mind were few and far between. And, where they may exist, they were also hard-pressed to reshape their organizations out of monstrous obstructions of monstrously encrusted educational systems.

That made me think about future schools or better put, schooling. Did we, do we, really know what we mean by education for the 21st century?  Are our imaginations welded with our capacity to recreate what must be recreated in order to truly meet the needs of the children we are yet to educate for a future society we are yet to imagine?

Enough Ranting

And ranting it was. I am passionate about what I said my preferred future for education is and embrace it with all the zeal I can muster up in this old soul.

And I am pressing you, my readers to press yourselves too. You must decide what it is you prefer about the EduFuture that is out there, just around the bend and also way down the highway of time.

Be wary of the paragraph above because it subtly suggests yet another paradigm about futuring. You, and I too, must align to the extent that we can, what metaphor best captures what we mean by future.

By future do we mean a fixed track, something like a roller coaster track whose course our car must follow whichever way it swerves, rises, or dips? We can’t see where we are going too far ahead but we do know we have little control over where we end.

Or do we mean that the future is more like an ocean liner? Such a vessel has a course charted by the stars and compass. Yet it can also be buffeted and even blown off course by unexpected storms and currents? In the end though, our charts and engines will enable us to find our way.

Are there more metaphors? For sure. But let’s work with these for now and feel free to offer up others if you think it will enrich the conversation.

For me I like the ocean liner one. I realize I may not be able to withstand the buffet of overpowering winds and turbulence all the time but I also know that I have the power to prepare properly and build my capacity to chart my own course.

Here Are the Educational Futures I Prefer

At this point I am pretty sure I know what educational  future I want for today’s and yet – born children.

I want a schooling system, formal and informal, that will enable all of our children to not only survive uncertain futures but thrive in them.

I want a formal and informal schooling system that will power wash off the  collective crusts of stultifying mental models and of self serving interests that do little more than perpetuate mediocrity.

I want a schooling system, formal and informal, that will repudiate organizational structures that only mostly work for middle class white children and that acknowledges all children deserve all chances to be all of what they can be.

I want innovation and creativity to rule all forms of instruction, formal and informal. I want rote, Baltimore Catechism (most of you will have to look that up!), spit back learning to be BANNED at best or at least permitted as a minimum quota of instructional time.

I want technology used, NOT for technology’s sake but embedded in innovative and creative instructional strategies that will in the end create what I want most of all:

I want schooling, formal and informal, to create what the future, whatever it may be most nearly, most certainly, will demand, to create people who can think for themselves rather than to accept the Flavor of the Day or to mindlessly accept their lot life.

What did Paul Simon once sing?

When I think about all the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all.”

Fred Flintstone or George Jetson?

This blog collection may very well raise more questions than it answers. Indeed what I’d like to see are your two cents. Because the more  input this blog collects the more likely we can distill what may lie at the bottom of the test tube.

And what may lie down there, after everything is boiled off, may actually tell us what it is we want from our schools for our students.

The more I read, and the more I experience in what is now forty-two years of education at all levels is that we don’t know what we want.

“We want students to have high self esteem.”

“We want students prepared for the twenty-first century.”

“We want students to compete in a global economy.”

“We want students to meet high standards.”

Oh I know there’s more. But let’s start with what’s above in succeeding posts before I weigh in with what I think we need and what we want. But I will foreshadow my thoughts right now by stating very firmly that we as a nation have not gotten our act together and we really have to do that.

Now, having said this, it still begins with knowing what we want. That speaks to the the three P’s. What is probable, what is possible and what is PREFERABLE!