Rethinking Schooling for the New Information Era

(Originally titled “Students First, Not Stuff”)

In this lead article in Educational Leadership, author/speaker Will Richardson says the Web has upended our long-standing belief that school is where students learn the most important stuff. Now it’s one of many sources of information – and often not the most compelling. “Welcome to what portends to be the messiest, most upheaval-filled 10 years in education that any of us has ever seen. Resistance, as they say, is futile.” 

How should schools handle the new reality? Not by buying expensive technology to put on top of the traditional curriculum, says Richardson, but by honestly addressing four big questions:

• What do we mean by learning? If the answer is higher test scores, change will be superficial – old wine in new bottles. Seymour Sarason said it best: effective education is a process that “engenders and reinforces wanting to learn more.” That means transferring power from teacher to student – “it implies that students discover the curriculum rather than have it delivered to them,” says Richardson. “It suggests that real learning that sticks – as opposed to learning that disappears once the test is over – is about allowing students to pursue their interests in the context of the curriculum… Teachers must be co-learners with kids, expert at asking great, open-ended questions and modeling the learning process required to answer those questions.” 

• What does it mean to be literate? It’s much more than learning to read and write more proficiently. Now, according to the National Council of Teachers of English, it includes students and teachers being proficient with technology and being able to “manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information” and share information globally. 

• What does it mean to be educated? “Instead of helping our students become ‘college ready,’” says Richardson, “we might be better off making them ‘learning ready,’ prepared for any opportunity that might present itself down the road.” MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) will revolutionize higher education, opening up amazing, worldwide learning opportunities outside of classrooms. 

• What do students need to know? The conventional knowledge curriculum was created for an era when information was scarce, says Richardson. But the world is different now. “The reality is that I no longer need to send my children to a school to learn algebra, U.S. history, or French,” he says. Students who have “a self-directed disposition to learn” can take advantage of the material that’s now freely available on the Web – for example, MIT’s Open Courseware at http://ocw.mit.edu and Khan Academy at http://www.khanacademy.org. Of course students still need school to teach them to read and write, do basic math, and have a rudimentary understanding of science, history, and other areas. But the name of the game now is to develop kids’ self-directed disposition to learn. “That means rethinking classrooms to focus on individual passions, inquiry, creation, sharing, patient problem solving, and innovation,” says Richardson. And that will not happen by buying a lot of fancy technology that just jazzes up the old, tired curriculum. 

“Students First, Not Stuff” by Will Richardson in Educational Leadership, March 2013 (Vol. 70, #6, p. 10-14), www.ascd.org; Richardson can be reached at will@willrichardson.com

From the Marshall Memo #476