Taking the risk

I spent a very enjoyable day in North Yorkshire this week working with the teachers and students of Skipton Girls High School. I was invited to give a keynote presentation at the start of the school year and afterwards watched a showcase of all the students and staff have been doing with technology and learning. In my own presentation I challenged teachers to take risks by breaking down some of the silos that currently exist in education. I asked why we still use ICT suites, which send a message to the children that 'this is where we do computing'. We have the technology to do this now in the palm of our hands, so why do we continue to tether children to one specific space? The same applies to subject teaching. Why do we stick to one subject for each lesson, when in fact all subjects have links across the entire curriculum. Why do we insist on synchronized behaviour, where everything is dependent on the clock? Many of these practices, I argued, are vestiges of a long gone industrial era. They represent the factory model of education where children are 'batch processed' by age group rather than ability. Perpetuating standardised testing regimes is also a big mistake. What does it achieve apart from providing whole school data for league tables? How will standardised testing encourage children to think independently and creatively?

Today, I argued, we need to prepare children for flexible working and agile thinking, where their employment may well be highly mobile and location independent. They will need to acquire critical thinking and problem solving skills, and will need to be highly digitally literate. They will need to be creative and will need to know how to innovate. They will need to know how to self organise, and also work in distributed teams, where the other members of that team may be connected over great distance through technology. They will need to gain an appreciation that change is an opportunity rather than a threat, and that a lifetime of work may encompass a portfolio career of several different jobs, requiring different skill-sets. They will need to be lifelong learners. I warned that anything less will not prepare children for a future we cannot clearly describe, but may even disadvantage them.

I was gratified later on during the student showcases to see that Skipton Girls High School is clearly already adopting many of the innovative learning strategies that will prepare children for portfolio careers in an uncertain future. Skipton is beginning to break down the compartmentalisation between curriculum subjects. I saw several examples of how students are learning a combination of physics and music (analogue and digital sound engineering principles) and again physics coupled with biology (how sound waves are interpreted into impulses for hearing). SGHS is an Engineering specialist school, so the emphasis is clearly on problem solving, design and implementation of ideas. I asked one of the students why she thought it was important to have lessons where different subjects were linked. 'Because when we do that, we get a better understanding of what we are learning' she replied. I was also impressed by the co-construction projects the students were involved in. Co-construction involves group work, collaborative skills, decision making, negotiation, creative problem solving, diplomacy, design skills, and a whole host of other soft skills, all of which are essential in the modern workplace. The students used PowerPoint to create hyperlinks between their content, which they developed as a part of their course. Students creating the course content - now there's innovation. SGHS is a very impressive set up. The teachers and students are willing to take risks to make the necessary changes that will break schools out of the stranglehold the industrial era still exerts on contemporary education. Skipton and other schools are trailblazing the way ahead, where risk taking, creative thinking and new technologies are central components in that process. Let's hope that more schools do the same.

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Taking the risk by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.