Creating the Future School: Coming, Ready or Not (Student Outcomes and the Reform of Education)

Creating the Future School: Coming, Ready or Not (Student Outcomes and the Reform of Education) eBook: Hedley Beare: leondumoulin.nl: Kindle Store.
Table of contents

Education has traditionally consisted of the two fundamental elements of teaching and learning, with a heavy emphasis on teaching. Throughout history, the transfer of information from the teacher to the learner has been done on a person-to-person basis. A teacher stands in front of a room and imparts the information for a student to learn.

A teacher-dependent education system is also time-dependent, location-dependent, and situation-dependent. The teachers act as a control valve, turning on or off the flow of information. The education system of the future will undergo a transition from a heavy emphasis on teaching to a heavy emphasis on learning. Experts will create the courseware and the students will learn anytime or anywhere at a pace that is comfortable for them, learning about topics that they are interested in.

In the future, teachers will transition from topic experts to a role in which they act more as guides and coaches. Exponential Growth of Information During the time of Gutenberg, people tended to live and die within 20 miles of where they were born, not because they were afraid to travel, but because they had no reliable maps. People during this era had a very limited understanding of the world around them.

The flow of information was controlled by just a few elite members of society, and they understood well the concept of knowledge equaling power. We have gone from that time, just years ago, where information was precious and few, to today, a time where information is so plentiful that we feel like we are drowning in it — information overload.

Elite members of society still control the flow of information, perpetuating the notion that only doctors can understand medicine, only physicists can understand how the universe works, and only teachers know how to prepare us for the world to come. There are many ways to talk about the rapid growth of information that we have experienced over the past few years. But it is important to pay attention to the changing dimensions of information as well as the sheer volume of it. Information is no longer just text-based, but graphical, musical, audio and visual.

Courseware Vacuum After viewing the data above and thinking about the size and shape of information around the world, now consider the number of courses available, either online or in a classroom. Information is exploding around us in every possible form. Yet, we do not have an easy way to translate these blocks of information into courseware. While some attempts are currently being made to unleash the public on this problem, we remain a long ways from solving the problem.

Open Education Movement — The open-education movement was inspired by the open-source software movement i. It mixes in the powerful communication abilities of the Internet and applies the result to teaching and learning materials, such as course notes and textbooks. Open educational materials include text, images, audio, video, interactive simulations, and games that are free to be used and also re-used in new ways by anyone around the world.

It is estimated that more than well-intentioned initiatives have been launched in this area. Some open-education projects are already attracting a large number of users per month. While we applaud these efforts, there are some critical elements missing. The learning system of the future will have a single access point for all of its courses.


  • Creating the Future School : Hedley Beare : .
  • Site Navigation?
  • ?
  • Tips and Traps When Buying a Home;

Moodle is claiming over , courses but they are spread over 20, sites and many courses are duplicates. We estimate the number of unique and different courses to be less than 50,, not in the millions like the number of available books and songs. Using books as a close analogy, it can be argued that every available book has the potential of being translated into courseware and, most often, multiple courses. There are currently far more topics discussed in books than there are courses to teach the material. This leaves an obvious courseware vacuum waiting to be filled, and the key to unlocking this vacuum is the participative courseware-builder described below.

The primary driver behind this ever-expanding dimension of vocabulary is the ongoing development of science and technology. Along with the creation of new science and technology comes the need to explain its attributes, its function in technical terms, and its overall purpose. New words and their associated colloquialisms help create meaning and structure around the emerging new concepts as they attract more research and come into focus. Young students can learn new words quickly: This, of course varies significantly from one student to the next. In the English language, the 2, most frequently used words account for percent of the words used in non-specialized written texts and about percent in conversational speech.

However, the total number of words in the English language tops out around one million words, and the vocabulary of some of our most gifted scientist and engineers tops out around , words. The distance between the functionally literate and the super literate is growing. Some people who have become expert on a specific topic have pushed the envelope of understanding far beyond the comprehension of the rest of the world. And in doing so, have created whole new vocabularies to describe the concepts and phenomenon they encountered.

These super experts often live in a research community where they are often the only living person who truly understands the topic of their research. Until now the primary tool for these super literates to pass along their understanding of research to future generations has been through papers that are published in technical journals. Because of the rigid requirements for publication, these papers often take months to compose, and are written in a vocabulary few can comprehend. An alternative to publishing papers will soon be the creation of courseware.

While developing courseware in the past has been laborious and poorly utilized, the new courseware builder described below has the potential to change all that. Courseware will become an alternative to publishing papers or writing books, and will serve as an additional channel for the super literates to disseminate their understanding of the world. As an example, the average person comes in contact with the physical world through three primary physical touch points or interfaces — the shoes that we walk in, the bed that we sleep in, and the chairs that we sit in.

These are the primary touch points for our physical body. While it is important to study the touch points for our physical body, it is even more important to understand the touch points for our mind. How does our mind interface with the rest of the world, and how can we improve the touch points to improve our abilities and capabilities? The Classroom Touch Point: There has long been the pervasive notion that learning can take place only in a classroom.

Classrooms are designed to focus attention, close off the rest of the world, and create a controllable environment where learning can take place. Most educators will argue that the real learning takes place inside the classroom. Even though external activities such as doing homework, reading assignments, or writing papers happen outside the bounds of the school, the primary education interface remains the classroom.

The person or education system that controls the classroom also controls the time when learning can take place, the students who will participate, the lighting, the sounds, the media used, the tools, the pace, the subject matter, and in many cases, the results. Learning takes place from the moment a person wakes up in the morning until they fall asleep at night.

In fact, learning continues even while a person is sleeping. We may not be learning about math and science while we watch a movie, but we learn about the characters in the movie, the plot, the setting, the drama, the resolution of the problem, the kind of popcorn a theater serves, and how comfortable the seats are. Indeed some topics like math and science require a more structured form of learning for most students to grasp the information being imparted, but learning is not dependent upon the classroom.

In some cases the classroom may be the optimal environment for learning to take place, but most often it is not. Important new touch points for our mind include our computers, electronic newspapers, video magazines, handheld televisions, cellphones, MP3 payers, video games, artwork, and much more. Learning Drivers Why do people need to learn? Why do people want to learn? What are their motivations? Within the deficiency needs, each lower need must be met before moving to the next higher level.

Once each of these needs has been satisfied, if at some future time a deficiency is detected, the individual will act to remove the deficiency. The first four levels were:. According to Maslow, an individual is ready to act upon the growth needs if and only if the deficiency needs are met. Self-actualized people were characterized by: Maslow later add a new dimension to the growth need of self-actualization, defining two lower-level growth needs below self-actualization and one above that level. Our motivations for learning form similar patterns.

For this reason, our desires to learn, and the topics we want to learn about, transition depending on the situation we find ourselves in. As an example, we will have very little desire to learn math and science if we are worried about survival. However, we will have a great desire to learn about survival topics.

The problem sets that surround us, and our ability to solve those problems, are a constantly refocusing lens into our learning motivators. His ultimate conclusion that the highest levels of self-actualization are transcendent in their nature may be one of his most important contributions in this area of study. Instead, we are much more concerned about finding products that will satisfy our own particular needs. We live in an era where we are approaching million products in the marketplace, and depending on how you define a product, some would argue that we have already far exceeded that number.

Suffice it to say that we now have products that are much more aligned with the needs of a very wide range of consumers, and consumers are voting with their debit cards for uniqueness and individuality. So much so that we have dubbed this the age of hyper-individuality. When the cable TV companies started offering different channels they found that all of the channels had an audience.

When Amazon started offering over 2 million different books for sale on its website it found that all of the books had a market. Our need for hyper-individualized solutions is driven by several factors including our time, our personality, and an overwhelming need to feel special in a world of over 6 billion other people wanting many of the same things. Today the average person sleeps two hours less than a person in the s. We have gone from 8.

With time being one of our major constraints, we are continually searching for products that will save us time, and if we can find that left-handed, counter-balanced, pocket-sized device that we can operate efficiently on moon-lit nights when the stars are aligned, we will make the purchase.

The Future Of Education | Future Trends In Education | Futurist Predictions - Futurist Speaker

Transition from Consumers to Producers As we transition from a predominantly passive society to a more active one, people no longer want to just sit on the sidelines and watch. They want to participate. And a whole new generation of tools and equipment are allowing people to shift their role from consumer to producer.

This transition began with the introduction of comment sections at the end of online news posts. People began to voice their thoughts on whether or not a piece of news was accurate, timely, or in any way news-worthy. Many commenters added additional information. Suddenly it became easy for anyone to create a blog site, and millions of people began to experiment. As a site that allowed users to generate their own website and connection to friends, MySpace quickly became the dominant player in the emerging category of social networking with the millionth user account created in August As an enormously popular and free video sharing website, YouTube lets users upload, view, share, and rate video clips.

As a result, millions of people have transitioned from video consumers to video producers with an average of 65, new video clips uploaded onto YouTube every day. While each of these are examples of runaway success stories, the world of user-generated content is not without its own set of problems. Each has managed to handle the challenges in their own unique way. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking in terms of past top-down approaches.

Instead, we need to focus on the key elements, the seeds of innovation, which will allow this new organic form of education to spring to life. New forms of education are not achieved by putting an umbrella over our existing education systems and networking them with hopes that they will get better. Education in its current state is the equivalent of Roman numerals, a system that is preventing us from achieving great things.

Since most people still believe that education must take place in the classroom, and only educators can create new courses, we have placed a very constrictive valve on the inflow of new courseware. The retail world had very similar restrictions just a few years ago, with the cost of shelf space being one of the primary constraints to the introduction of new products. But the online marketplace has given us unlimited shelf space at a near-zero cost. This combination of super cheap and unlimited shelf space has caused an exponential growth curve in the introduction of new products.

The notion that education can take place only in a classroom is similar to the notion that purchasing a product can only take place when you see it on a store shelf. Removing the classroom constraints to learning is similar to removing the shelf space constraints to the marketplace.

At the same time that we have been experiencing the exponential growth of information, the amount of available courseware has remained rather static and consequently, our education systems have not kept pace. Only a small percentage of the information being developed today is being passed on to future generations in the form of classes or courseware.

Certifying Accuracy — Truth vs. Untruth As we contemplated the education system of the future, one of our biggest concerns was finding a way to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. Initially our thinking centered around the idea of selecting a central authority, some sort of governing truth authority, to authenticate the accuracy of information in each of the courseware modules.

But this approach became unworkable as we considered the implications. To begin with, a high percentage of what is taught in classes today is theoretical, ranging from theories of gravity, to theories of evolution, to music theory. None of these topics end up being percent provable, and so from the standpoint of passing muster with a governing truth authority, none of these topics could be included. Further, we realized that virtually every aspect of society has its own version of truth — religious truths, scientific truths, legal truths, etc.

For this reason we concluded that any governing truth authority would quickly deteriorate into a highly politicized authority, and the politicalization of any aspect of this future learning system will quickly compromise its usefulness. As an alternative, we are proposing a checks-and-balances system where individual groups can create their own central truth authority and place their tags of approval or disapproval on courses. These tags will be a central feature of the search criteria used by the smart profiler and the recommendation engine.

For example, organizations like the American Chemical Society, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Focus on the Family, American Civil Liberties Union, National Rifle Association, National Education Association, or the Catholic Church can all review the new courseware that is being introduced and make a determination as to whether or not it meets their criteria.

We think that such organizations will quickly gear up to develop their own line of courseware so they can have better control of the content. This type of tagging system holds value on many levels. First, it creates ways for virtually everyone to participate, and in fact, demands participation. Participation is an essential ingredient in a truly pervasive education system. While many different learning methodologies will be experimented with, one that holds considerable promise is confidence-based learning.

Some experiments in this area have demonstrated a significant reduction in learning time. Her goal was to improve the validity and reliability of standard musical assessments at the time. She did so by adding confidence assessment to knowledge. Fron , Confidence-Based Assessment focused on statistical validity and reliability. In it was discovered that Confidence-Based Assessment also improved memory retention. This is the discovery where people began to realize that the process of taking a test can and will make you smarter. What started as a breakthrough approach for measuring knowledge and confidence is now moving front-and-center into corporate training centers in the form of a fast and accurate learning methodology.

The Future of Education

Confidence-based learning is on the rise among organizations that are transitioning their companies from training organizations to learning organizations. Confidence-based learning is designed to ensure that learning actually takes place and mastery of a topic is achieved. It is much more than simply delivering information to students. Determining what people need to learn starts by understanding what ignorance, doubts and misinformation presently exists.

Unlike traditional learning methodologies that measure only how many questions someone answers correctly, confidence-based learning assesses. Distinguishing between a person guessing correctly and one who answers correctly with confidence can have a major impact. An assessment process that is built into the system can capture and validate knowledge confidence because of the unique structure of its multiple-choice questions and detailed analysis. With the completion of an assessment, confidence-based learning is designed to close knowledge gaps at the moment users are most inclined to learn — right after being evaluated and their own misinformation and doubt has been exposed.

Archiving Knowledge While rarely viewed as such, education is a system for archiving a culture by passing down the knowledge of one generation to the next. Museums, written documents, books, photos, videos and audio recordings typically come to mind when considering a cultural archive. Craftsman guilds such as tilers and bricklayers are a good example of trades that require hands-on experience. The intricacies and nuances of piecing together building materials into artistic patterns cannot be adequately conveyed through books or even video.

The tactile feel of textures, tapping, testing for hollow spots, and cleaning off excess material are all part of the experiential learning that cannot be conveyed through some other medium. The concept of archiving knowledge is just one of many theories that will emerge as strategies around the new system begin to develop. As we begin to peel back the layers of the system we are envisioning, we will use a number of different descriptors and definitions to describe the nature of the new, new era of learning.

The key to this whole system is an easy-to-use courseware builder that catches the imagination of the general public and inspires participation. Several features will be necessary to give this system both the range and functionality of a truly rich learning environment. We have identified 12 critical dimensions of the future learning system.

However, only the first two need to be in place for the revolution to begin. The two critical components that will define education for centuries to come will be a standardized architecture for developing a courseware unit, and an organic distribution system that allows anyone around the world access to it.

In the past, creating a standard was often a long and tedious process where smart people gathered around tables and argued about where to place the comma in a sentence. But times have changed, and so has the development process for standards. Very likely the development of a standard will happen concurrently with the early testing of courseware modules, with the drafting of the standard document happening in parallel to the testing of the architecture. The final standard may not be finished for several years. Competing standards can be divisive, creating temporary chaos in the industry, and greatly delaying market acceptance.

Also, the path to market acceptance would end up being far more expensive. So, what will a standard courseware unit look like? The short answer is that it is too early to know, but we have to have a starting point. For this reason we have put together a list of attributes and features that we think will be necessary components:. The Courseware Builder — Envisioned as a smooth, fill-in-the-blanks templated process, the courseware builder will carefully step courseware producers through the design, build, and launch phases of each course.

We schedule our time in one-hour units, we plan our days in one-hour units, so building educational modules around one hour units makes sense. Some learning experiences may involve a grouping of 2, 5, or even 10 units, but the majority will be centered around the basic one-hour unit.


  • Top Authors.
  • It Dont Mean a Thing (If It Aint Got That Swing);
  • You Did What?: Mad Plans and Incredible Mistakes.
  • .
  • Shedding the Reptile: A Memoir.
  • Sentire insieme. Le forme dellempatia (Italian Edition)!

Modality Agnostic, Language Agnostic — Learning comes in many forms ranging from reading text, to listening to audio, to watching video, to hands-on experiences, and more. The Standard Courseware Unit needs to accommodate all modes of sensory input and learning experiences. Test scores that are lower than minimum required proficiency levels will force students to repeat portions of the learning experience until students have achieved mastery.

Smart Profiler — In addition to the basic name and address type of information found in most profiles, students will be asked to participate in regularly scheduled assessment surveys to determine primary and secondary areas of interest. The smart profiler will continually expand the profile of the student throughout their life, recalibrating topical interest levels, building a comprehensive understanding of the individual student as they evolve over time.

Site Mobile Navigation

The Smart Profiler will feed information directly to the Personal Recommendation Engine for prioritizing course selections. Multi-Dimensional Tagging Engine — Much of the system usability will be driven by the multi-dimensional nature of the tagging engines. Personal Recommendation Engine — Each time the student completes a course, the Personal Recommendation Engine will present a number of possible future courses based on personal interests and past courses.

This engine should offer an expanded view of possible directions the student can take, listing a variety of learning options as well as the certification endpoints.

Creating the Future School

Certification Inputs — Every profession, personal skill, or area of learning has logical points where experts in that field would consider the necessary learning to be sufficiently complete. But every profession or skill is different. Teaching Montessori in the Home: Pre-school Years Elizabeth G. Indelible Leadership Michael Fullan.

The Art of Coaching Elena Aguilar. The Magic of Metaphor Nick Owen. Logically Fallacious Bo Bennett. Leadership in Early Childhood Jillian Rodd. Disobedient Teaching Welby Ings. Creative Schools Sir Ken Robinson. Narrative Counseling in Schools Gerald D. Discussion as a Way of Teaching Stephen Brookfield. Teaching Naked Jose Antonio Bowen. The Window of Certainty Rob Stones. Sustainable Leadership Andy Hargreaves. Other books in this series.

Creating the Future School Hedley Beare. The Inner Principal David Loader. Designing the Learning-centred School Clive Dimmock. School Management in Transition Dale E. Schooling for Change Andy Hargreaves. Leadership for Quality Schooling Colin W.

Prepare Our Kids for Life, Not Standardized Tests

Table of contents 1. The myth of the unchanging school Part I: From an old world-view to a new 3. From a society of factories to a society of knowledge workers 4.

Bestselling Series

New ways of knowing: The networked universe 6. From bureaucracy to enterprise networks Part II: Looking at the practicalities: Schools which break the mould 8. Choosing what future to have 9. Building a manifesto for the school as a provider