Classroom 2.0

Will wrote a post yesterday about his kids and their potential educational futures. I still need some time to think about that, but I found a link to an article in the comments that fascinated me. An article by Daniel Pink in Reason that addresses ideas of free agency for learners in education.

An awesome read, lets start with this:

"Whenever I walk into a public school, I'm nearly toppled by a wave of nostalgia. Most schools I've visited in the 21st century look and feel exactly like the public schools I attended in the 1970s. The classrooms are the same size. The desks stand in those same rows. Bulletin boards preview the next national holiday. The hallways even smell the same. Sure, some classrooms might have a computer or two. But in most respects, the schools American children attend today seem indistinguishable from the ones their parents and grandparents attended."

Trouble enough alone, but it continues:

"But then I thought about it. How many other places look and feel exactly as they did 20, 30, or 40 years ago? Banks don't. Hospitals don't. Grocery stores don't. Maybe the sweet nostalgia I sniffed on those classroom visits was really the odour of stagnation. Since most other institutions in American society have changed dramatically in the past half-century, the stasis of schools is strange."

My emphasis added...

I could cut and paste portions of the entire article, paragraph after paragraph, but I'd much rather you read it in its original context. The article continues to state that mass education, where we pursue the same issues, with kids the same age, in the same ways, with the same tool, is an aberration compared to the way that the rest of society is organized.

Aberration.....  That is a powerful word....

Then the piece continues with this:

"Yet it was the ideal preparation for the Organization Man economy, a highly structured world dominated by large, bureaucratic corporations that routinized the workplace. Compulsory mass schooling equipped generations of future factory workers and middle managers with the basic skills and knowledge they needed on the job. The broader lessons it conveyed were equally crucial. Kids learned how to obey rules, follow orders, and respect authority -- and the penalties that came with refusal."

The worst part of all of this is that this article is already five years old. It was published in 2001.

I'm getting to the point where I want to be finished with old ways. I truly believe that we are actively harming the kids in our classrooms when we are not preparing them for the society they live in. But more and more I roll around at night, get up early in the mornings and wonder what those new ways look like. Do we even know what we want? What would a classroom that actively supports kids in learning the skills which will best prepare them to be active, informed, concerned citizens in the twenty first century look like? If we could do anything, what would it be?

I have some ideas and I know that some people consider my classroom to be a leader in these ideas and directions, but I still don't think that as a community, we've fully set a direction, an agenda for what we'd like to see our classrooms become. Several things are clear to me, one of them being the more blog posts that my class produces, the more videos we make, and the more podcasts we produce, I see more clearly that while the technology is essential and makes it possible for us to work in the ways we need to, my vision for what classrooms need to look like involves more ideas of information based studios, not cubicles filled with programmers.

People have been calling on me to present information and get it "out there" more formally, but what is the best way to do that? write a book? a set of essays? make videos of my classroom? start making more presentations? People need concrete information of what daily schedules look like, what lessons and assessments might be like. I committed to changing what I do and setting priorities for classrooms to move forward. We need to find ways to do that.

Thoughts?

technorati tags:learning, change, classroom, daniel, pink, web, 2.0

Comments

[Darren Kuropatwa]

I've been on this roller coaster for almost two years now. Recently, when talking to other teachers about web 2.0 in the classroom, I find myself saying over and over again: "If you use blogs, wikis, podcasts and other tools to do the same assignments and assessment you've always done you're missing the point. New tools require new pedagogies."

What are those new pedagogies? What are those new styles of assessment?

I think articulating and modeling these practices, first for the kids in our classes, then for colleagues in our neighbouring classrooms, is the best way to get it "out there."

The thing is, it's slow going ... and I'm getting impatient. My kids are in grades 1 and 5.