2020 Curriculum

When I talk to teachers about the school curriculum, whether primary or secondary, guess what they want to discuss the most? Correct - assessment. When I crowdsourced for material for this series of blog posts on #learning2020, a lot of the comments I received back were about assessment. It's no surprise that Teachers hate it (marking is time consuming and not particularly useful, given the effort involved) just as much as children hate it (threatening, stressful, not very helpful for their learning). Just about the only people who love assessment are the government and the organisations who ... er, organise assessment. I have ranted several times recently on this blog about the difficulties of standardised assessment, and we have had interesting and thought provoking discussions here on alternative assessment methods. What kinds of assessment will there be in 2020? Will they be different from today, or will we (perish the thought) be lumbered with useless, discriminatory and impractical testing for years to come? Here's what you said:

Madeleine Brookes, technology integrator and ITGS teacher in Beijing, China, predicted that we will move from handwritten exams to online submission, which I think is a reasonable position to take. Regardless of the issues of verifiability of students and technical issues, online submission seems to be an advance on current exam systems. Others, including Ollie Bray, Scotland's National Advisor for emerging technologies, and Adrian Bradshaw, and ICT subject leader in Plymouth, England, made suggestions that assessment as we know it will be completely obsolete by 2020. Whilst I can't second guess their reasoning behind this, I assume it's because assessment in its current form does not prepare learners for the future, and it certainly doesn't add much to their experience of learning in school. Adrian went as far as to suggest that the National Curriculum as we currently know it will face the axe - because again, it is inadequate for the needs of learners. David Truss (an educator based in Dalian, China) agreed, arguing that curricula are overload and should be changed, but admitted that it will probably take a long time.

I agree, school curricula are overloaded with too many subjects and too much content which places too much pressure on the teacher to cover everything in the available time. This tends to militate against time and space available for learners to play, experiment, and ask the 'what if...' questions. Creativity can be stifled, particularly if the teacher slips into an instruction mode as a strategy to simply 'get through' all the content. Julian Wood, a primary educator in Sheffield, England, has a solution to this problem - He suggests we should adopt 'child led learning where the curriculum is dominated by skills needed for future employment.' Too much over-reliance on grades is another problem. Why do we force children to jump through so many hoops? We're not all Physical Education teachers are we? (That was a joke, btw - some of my best friends are PE teachers). Children should not be misled into thinking that getting high grades assures them a good job. It doesn't. So who are the grades for? They certainly help the government to obtain a clear picture of 'how a school is performing'... Go figure.

I will leave the last word to Adrian Bradshaw: 'I hope in future [the] curriculum will focus on creativity and thinking and not destroy divergent thinking'. Amen to that.

Image source Exam tables in sports hall, Epsom College by David Hawgood


2020 Curriculum by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

2020 Classrooms

Will we still need classrooms by 2020? If so, what kind of learning environments will they be? Or will students learn on the move, in their workplaces, at home, and through the multiple connections facilitated by new communication technology? This is a difficult question to answer, because school and education, although not synonymous, are deeply ingrained in our culture and have become a key component of our social, political and economic thinking. Implicit in the question are a number of issues, including the relationship between teaching and curriculum, and nature of state funded education and the role of teachers. Also under the spotlight are the demands of society, work, family and community, and how these are balanced against the needs of individual learners.

I recently used Twitter to crowdsource a number of responses to what would be obsolete in education in 2020. The discussion can be found under the hashtag #learning2020. In this post I would like to present some of the tweets, and provide a critical commentary around them, in the hope that it will provide a useful contribution to the discourse surrounding the purpose of education and the future of learning.

The design and configuration of classrooms was a particular concern for several people. Melissa Brown Boyle, an elementary school teacher in the USA, predicted that school classrooms of the future will have "fewer individual student desks and more tables or open floor space conducive to discussion and movement". She also believes in moving learning beyond traditional settings: "open discussion space must be global not just local, virtual links are just as real as graffiti on desks.” She has a point, because often, classrooms are cluttered with furniture, and provide less space for creative activities to be organised. These are sentiments echoed by another teacher, Vanessa Camilleri, who calls for more creative options through flexibility - the global classroom is already there for the making. So, do we need to redesign classrooms to make them more conducive to personalised and creative forms of learning? Evelyn MacElhinney is even more radical. She envisages 'hologram rooms' where students can 'learn in the scenario' and she advocates doing away with tables and chairs completely in schools of the future.

What about the way education is currently conducted? What about the closed nature of the classroom? Mr Colley, a teacher in the UK wants to see closed door classrooms become a thing of the past. He also predicts that teachers will very soon need to determine the differences between cheating and collaboration. Martin Homola, a PhD student in Slovakia, made the prediction that education behind closed doors will be obsolete by 2020. He suggests that 'online, open channels' will be the building blocks of future education. By this, I assume he means that open content, open source and open learning will come to the fore, and schools will be less protective over their content and classroom methods. Theo Kuechel agrees, and hopes to see 'more CC' and less 'C' on learning content in the future.

Sonia Cooper, also a teacher, wanted to see learning environments where each child had one device that 'did everything' including connecting to each other, the teacher, and content for learning. The scots had a lot to say about future learning: Kenny Pieper, an English teacher in Scotland, saw a future where the classroom was replete with iPads, Kindles and other personal tools for learning. Others such as Fraser Speirs, a head of computing, at a school in Scotland, also called for 1-1 technology provision, but added wisely that children should be presented with challenge-based learning. Yet Ian Stuart, a Deputy Head teacher in Scotland, warned that perhaps the "idea of 1-1 tablets in 2020 is like man in 1900 thinking we'd have really fast steam engines by 2000". He's right of course. When gazing into the future, we should certainly not constrain our thinking to current mindsets and conceptions of technology. Instead, we should try to be like the children in our classes - to let our imagination run riot, because from this can come the creative solutions for the problems of the future. What is your vision for 2020 learning?

Previous posts in this series on 2020 Learning include 2020 Learners and 2020 Vision.

Image source by Shuichiro


2020 Classrooms by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

2020 Vision

I read a post by Tina Barseghian on the Mind/Shift Blog entitled '21 things that will be obselete by 2020' today, which prompted me to start a conversation on Twitter to discuss what we think school would look like in another decade or less. Discussions are still ongoing in projects such as Purpos/ed about what education should be for/about, and gazing into the future challenges our ideas similarly. By thinking about what the future may look like for schools, we reflect on what we would like to see. By doing this, we critically evaluate where we are and where we have come from. I took this picture at a hi-tech convention and trade fair in Germany last month. In among all the shiny technology vendor stands sat this anacronism - a replication of the school classroom that I recall from my primary school days. The only thing missing was the inkwells, knibs and paper. The organisers had obviously done this for a purpose. For me, the purpose was to cause people to remember where we have come from in our personal journeys through education. It was also to remind us never to go back to that kind of education, but instead to move forwards. I am left asking my own question - what is my vision for education in the future?

In 2020, will we wander around learning technology exhibitions (or museums) and see simulations of computers with keyboard and mice? Will there actually be any physical exhibitions and museums? Will we gaze upon exhibits of school ICT suites and smile? And will our grandchildren sit on our knees and ask us - did you really have to touch computers to make them work?

What will school look like in the next 10 years? Will be still send children to school? Will there still be classrooms? What will the roles of teachers be in the next 10 years? Will they still be doing the same things? What will assessment of learning look like and what forms will it take? What new forms will technology take to facilitate mobile, anytime, anyplace learning? What will the curriculum look like and what will it contain? Just as importantly, what will be left out? Will teachers still experience the same problems of state interference, time and space pressures and lack of resources? Or will there be other, even more serious problems? Over the next few posts on this blog I'm going to attempt to discuss these questions, and I intend to draw on the comments received from readers and those who have already contributed their ideas on Twitter. The hashtag to use is #learning2020. Let's have a dialogue which may help us to see where we have come from and where we need to go, to secure quality learning for the next 10 years and beyond.

2020 Vision by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.