There is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century life. It has been an ongoing concern of mine, as I visit schools I work with, how vast the gap is between children’s experience of the world as they know it and their experience of school life.
The key jobs that our children are growing into are based in communication, collaboration, media and enterprise. Why then has teaching not caught up?
Smartboards are available in most classrooms (not all) nowadays but are they used as an interactive resource or as a colourful ‘blackboard’ for the teacher to use to give over knowledge? Time and again I see children filling in worksheets. Children could and should be focusing on working in collaboration, using modern technology to enhance their learning. They are digital natives and naturally intuitive – just ask any five year old to become a member of “Moshi Monsters”– teaching them how to ask the right questions to locate information safely and put their findings into a PowerPoint may be more useful at this time than writing a story and correcting their spellings three times.
Mobile phones are a fact of life – why not use them to benefit the lesson output and tweet opinions to the teacher to add during a discussion? Instead, they are banned as a disturbance/deterrent – again alienating the school experience from the child’s real world.
Safe social networking sites schools could easily create would enable children to be interested in their own school community and not have to look elsewhere socially, at risk. There are huge numbers of children operating unmoderated facebook accounts – would it not be safer to communicate within a school community network?
Online learning, sharing documents, blogging and iPads could all be utilised in the classroom to maximum effect at relatively low cost. Initial outlays for iPads may be daunting – but there is documented evidence that children work better digitally in collaborative groups, so it is not essential to get one per child or even one per class. As iPads become increasingly popular, perhaps a freecycling atmosphere can encourage parents to donate their old iPads and tablets to schools.
Replace all the cost of photocopying endless worksheets and buying countless textbooks and the costs will soon be recouped.
The teacher’s role is changing – with the educator really becoming a facilitator encouraging independent discovery. Although there is a place for rote learning, should it be a focus when you have every answer known to man on Google? From a Torah perspective we have hierarchy – we have Rabbis, teachers and leaders to lead the community and be role models to our children. But we need to talk in a language that our youth understand.
Inside our classrooms we need to catch up, fast!