#GELPedu - The Shared Responsibility of Learning with Charles Leadbetter


Leadbetter opened by talking about his paper that addressed Personalised Learning in 2004, which at the time was challenged and picked and apart - it is heartening that the discourse around personalised learning is so strong now.  

There's enormous agreement about where we are at and what we need to do. Now we need to move on. The system that we have inherited is running into the sand. There is a sense that we want different things. We need to do something different to do something better. 

But education is gripped by a cartel of fear. 

Even when we praise the new we are holding on to the old models. Pisa is measuring measuring success of a an old model. 


Making change is the blue arrow and often feels tumultuous. 

There is a universal dialogue about competencies and fluencies needed for the 21C Learner.

What do we need to learning why?
How do we do it systematically? 
Where does it happen and who's involved?

He then used the analogy of self checkout at the grocery store. The first few times is a struggle, but he is determined to show his independence. Then as he is masters it, he realises that he has been duped into being a checkout operator. Ultimately we are moving to to more and more being automated. We are all going to have to question what roles we will maintain as humans. We will have to question what our roles will actually be. 

In many ways education equates to a 12 year training programme to become a not very good robot. 

We need to be focusing on:
Problem solving
Opportunity seeking
Creating value and meaning
Purpose led collaborative agency

How do you achieve stuff that matters? With other people to live well as a human in a fragile age. 

Charles Leadbetter sums up the competencies needed as:
Knowing
Questioning
Communicating
Collaborating 
Making 
Persistence 

Purpose breeds capability. If education has a purpose and is going somewhere, then capability will come.

Passion is great, but it shouldn't stop at what you think should want to be. Passion should: excite, be diverse, test, stretch, deepen and should be open.

He posed four sets of questions:

Assessment: How do we assess it? Do we need to assess it?

Practice: How do we prepare people for doing this?

Policy: what's the enabling framework?

Framing: what language do we use? What do we call it?

If we call ourselves innovative, alternative, 21 century etc - we are in danger of being interesting but marginal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The National, Act and NZ First Coalition and what it means for education

Image
Photo Source Yesterday saw the announcement of a new government which came with a raft of new policies and ministerial appointments. The Minister of Education, as was expected, is National MP Erica Stanford. More interestingly was the number of policies and priorities two parties who only collectively gained 15.5% of the votes managed to get across the line.  The common threads across both Act and NZ First included some good old-fashioned back-to-basics, a focus on compulsory attendance and cracking down on truancy, increased focus on academic achievement and shifting the fees-free policy from the first of uni to the last. To be fair, none of these represent much of a departure from what National was touting anyway.  The interesting and, at times, worrying changes suggest Luxon was willing to let both Act and NZ First foist their ideologies on innocent schools and students for the sake of a "strong and stable" government.  Unsurprisingly Act got Partnership Schools across the
Read more

National, Act and the age of standardisation in education

Image
Chris and David discussing the joy of testing. Whilst we are still awaiting the outcome of special votes, it is pretty safe to assume that we are staring down the barrel of a National / Act Party government that will be bringing a very distinct flavour to the education landscape. Below is an outline of what each party promised for education.  Front and centre is a focus on "back to basics" and what looks like a whole lot more standardisation (from both National and Act) and testing to ensure we are all "teaching the basics brilliantly". Those of us in schools know that standardisation isn't necessarily the answer and testing didn't seem to turn the dial in the past either. That is the trouble when policies are designed to satisfy parent voters who just want their kids back in school and succeeding.  In their 100-day plan, National is promising to do the following in the education space: Require primary and intermediate schools to teach one hour a day each of
Read more

Assessment in the Age of AI - Claire Amos

Image
Below are the slides I shared at NZQA's 'Assessment in the Age of AI' symposium.   This is my brief overview of how we are approaching AI at Albany Senior High School and some of the concerns and some of thoughts I have about the topic.  In short, I am worried we are so damn busy we aren't giving it the attention it needs. I also worry that leaders will try and ignore and/or attempt to ban and that this ignores the fact that Pandora's Box is well and truly opened and this thing is developing faster than we can imagine and is increasingly woven into platforms and tools we already use. We are sitting at a fork in the path where both options lead to a world fundamentally altered by AI and we need to choose whether to work with it or stick our heads in the sand. That decision is going to have a tangible impact on how well our young people are going to be equipped to thrive in the future.  We need to embrace AI, and approach it with curiosity, criticality and care.  One
Read more