STUDENT-CENTRIC EDUCATION MODELS NEEDED

FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Milisa Sammaciccia Ismail, MEd.

Introduction to Teaching & Learning

In 1983, almost one generation after the National Commission on Excellence in Education published the historic report, A Nation at Risk, which provided a comprehensive assessment of the U.S. schools had ultimately determined that our education system was seriously lacking in four areas including:

• Curriculum Content• Student Expectations• Instruction Time• Teacher Preparation

Are Our Schools At Risk?In 2002, 19 years following this report, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was passed with a focus “aimed at closing the achievement gap by holding schools more accountable through increased use of standardized tests” (Wagner, 2008). The changes that ultimately ensued centered more on curriculum modifications that would ensure students passed the mandatory testing required to obtain funding for each school district.

What Was The Reaction?

Teachers quickly found themselves using their instruction time to teach students what they needed to know to pass these tests and little else. Have these recent changes also incorporated modifications in the curriculum that ensure students are actually learning the skills that will be relevant to compete and succeed in the 21st Century? Or do we need a new model that will support the new goals and education requirements our children must obtain to compete in a global economy?

Turn of The CenturyWith the turn of the century our world began to evolve rapidly into the “digital age” of an interconnected global society. (Palfrey, and Gasser, 2008) The expansion and adoption of technology has officially taken center stage and has irrevocably changed the economic landscape. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea of a “global village”, interconnected by an “electronic nervous system” and described how “events in one part of the world could be experienced from other parts in real-time” (Stewart, 2007). However in 1964, McLuhan’s “global village” of networked people was not a reality in our daily lives.

Digital Evolution

Now, 40 years later, we live, work and breathe in a digital world connected instantly to people around the world. We have an entire generation of “digital natives” born after 1980, who are not even aware of what life was like prior to cable and satellite television, cell phones and the internet (Palfrey, and Gasser, 2008). Children born in 2010 enter a world consumed and driven by multiple channels of instant communication networks.

If our ability to connect and communicate across the globe and access huge repositories of information on the world wide web has impacted how we live, work and communicate, has it also affected our methods of education? Ironically while the past decade has introduced monumental technical innovations into our every day lives, our education models have remained relatively static for the past 40 years.

While many say that the current education model is broken, does our 40 year old model simply not meet the new educational goals for global economy in the 21st Century? Well, before we can adequately answer whether new models of education are needed, we need to first examine the current model, identify the goals and purpose of education and finally determine whether the current model fulfills the goals of preparing students to compete and succeed in the 21st Century.

Where Did We Begin?

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, compulsory education which was first established in Massachusetts in 1852 and finally adopted by all states in the union by 1918, required that all children enroll and attend public or private school or be home-schooled.

The original intention for requiring children to attend school was to protect our democracy. “Basic education needed to be universal, so that all citizens could participate in the democracy.” (Christensen, 2008).

As the nation shifted from an agricultural society to an industrial one around the turn of the last century, the goal of education shifted from preparing citizens to participate in a democratic government to also include preparing “everyone for vocations” (Christensen, 2008).

Notable Changes

With the newly added educational goal, “the number of high school graduates exploded”, increasing from an average number of 100 students enrolled in high school at the beginning of the century to an average of 1,000 high school students by 1970 (Christensen, 2008).

Another change during this period included the number of different course offerings. “In 1890 there were only nine different course offerings across the whole of U.S. high schools; by 1973, high schools offered 2,100 classes under different headings” (Christensen, 2008).

Toward the end of the 1960s the goal and purpose of education changed again and moved from preparing students for vocations, to “asking schools to take on a new job of keeping the United States competitive” in an emerging global economy (Christensen, 2008).

The Result With the newly added educational goal, “the

number of high school graduates exploded”, increasing from an average number of 100 students enrolled in high school at the beginning of the century to an average of 1,000 high school students by 1970 (Christensen, 2008).

Another change during this period included the number of different course offerings. “In 1890 there were only nine different course offerings across the whole of U.S. high schools; by 1973, high schools offered 2,100 classes under different headings” (Christensen, 2008).

Goals Changed

Toward the end of the 1960s the goal and purpose of education changed again and moved from preparing students for vocations, to “asking schools to take on a new job of keeping the United States competitive” in an emerging global economy (Christensen, 2008). With this next new goal established, further attention focused on comparing average test scores and performance of U.S. students to those in other countries. While the “College Board, revealed in the mid-1970’s that average SAT scores had been declining since 1963”, it wasn’t until 1983 when the U.S secretary of education created the National Commission on Excellence in Education which produced the “landmark report, “A Nation at Risk”, that all eyes began to focus on how we were educating the nation’s youth (Christensen, 2008).

As the country began to recognize that our education system was failing to reach the goal of preparing students to be competitive in the global economy, scrutiny on the established standard education model began to unfold. While the report identified a number of various weak points in the education system from “homogenized, diluted and diffused” curriculum content, to student expectations, to comparison of time spent in the classroom to teacher qualifications and certifications, it missed the biggest problem of all (A Nation at Risk Findings). We had not adjusted our teaching model to meet student’s individual needs nor were we teaching students based on their individual learning styles.

Standardized Learning

The classroom of the 1950’s compared to 2010 has changed very little in 60 years. Granted computers adorn desks scattered throughout the room and frequently a television monitor can be located hovering in a corner to view educational videos, but generally speaking, desks remained lined in rows pointing toward the front of the classroom where the teacher lectures to students, disseminating knowledge and directing them to move from one lesson to another. “The teacher, who is generally the center of attention in the classroom, initiates most of the talk and orchestrates most of the interaction in the classroom around brief factual questions, if there is any discussion at all. Hence, the teacher is the main source of information” (Elmore, 2008).

“Students’ work is typically assessed by asking them to repeat information that has been conveyed by the teacher in the classroom, usually in the form of worksheets or tests that involve discrete, factual, right-or-wrong answers” (Elmore, 2008). “Much of the support behind this standardization –categorizing students by age into grades and then teaching batches of them with batches of material – was inspired by the efficient factory system that emerged in industrial America” (Christensen, 2008). However the process of standardization in education became further entrenched with the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act which mandated that all students be taught the exact same information at the same grade level regardless of individual ability.

Are We Ready For The 21st Century?

While this instructional model of disseminating knowledge met the goals of educating students in the industrial age at the turn of the 20th century, it is no longer applicable for achieving the task of educating students to compete in a global market. The primary reason this instructional model is failing is because it does not teach students the skills that will be required in the emerging “knowledge society” (Drucker, 1994). What are the skills that we need to teach our students to be competitive in the 21st Century?

What Do Employers Seek?In his recent book, What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis asked Jonathan Rosenberg, senior VP of product management at Google, what were the skills that Google looked for when hiring new employees? Rosenberg said that Google looks for individuals who have the following five skills:

Analytical Reasoning Communication Skills

Willingness To Experiment

Playing In A Team Passion and Leadership

“In the real world, “he said, “the tests are all open book and your success in inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market” (Jarvis, 2009).

Furthermore, in The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner interviews a number of CEO’s from Fortune 500 companies asking them what skills do students need to learn in order to compete in the global market. He identifies what he calls the “Seven Survival Skills” and lists them:

Critical Thinking &

Problem-Solving

Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by

InfluenceAgility &

AdaptabilityInitiative and

Entrepreneurialism

Effective Oral &Written

Communication

Accessing & Analyzing Information

Curiosity & Imagination

If our corporate leaders have clearly identified what skills and knowledge will be necessary to succeed in the 21st Century, then we are now equipped with a roadmap providing us the direction needed to create a relevant curriculum for our students. Have we modified the curriculum to teach these skills? Are teachers educating students to problem-solve and think critically?

Digital Data Banks

Our current model of education provides knowledge disseminated from teacher to student through oral lectures and written text books. Students obtain information, memorize facts, dates, statistics and data, and then regurgitate the data in response to test questions which determines whether or not a minimum number of questions were answered correctly in order to pass onto the next level. People are not information systems and computers process and disseminate data at a far superior rate than humans will ever hope to achieve. Why then are we educating our children in the same manner as we would download data into an electronic database? The answer is relatively simple to grasp, but more difficult to implement. While information technology and computers have been in existence since the 1960’s, the “Digital Age” did not arrive until the birth of the first generation of “digital natives” in 1980 (Palfrey, and Gasser, 2008). Thirty years later we are now just beginning to truly understand how to utilize and capitalize on digital information technology. People are frequently slow to move, change and adopt new ideas. According to Marshall McLuhan in the 1965 interview, McLuhan Predicts ‘World Connectivity’”, “we still have this obsessional, compulsive drive to fit into patterns, to fit into classifications” and “we are terrified when automation threatens to integrate us.” Essentially people find standardization and classification easier to process and understand.

The Progressive Era

Increasingly more theories are directing us toward innovative instructional techniques that would help us revise and improve our educational models. Some of these ideas are not necessarily new, but instead are being reintroduced given our current technological advancements. From “the early teens and into the 1940’s, education experienced an era of reform that was called “the Progressive Period” (Elmore, 2008). While “the progressive period had a wide agenda, one priority was an explicit attempt to change the core of schooling from a teacher-centered, fact-centered, recitation-based pedagogy to a pedagogy based on an understanding of children’s thought processes and their capacities to learn and use ideas in the context of real-life problems” (Elmore, 2008). The primary goal of this movement was to “break the lock of teacher-centered instruction and generate high levels of student engagement through student-initiated inquiry and group activities” (Elmore, 2008). The challenge that most schools encountered during the progressive period was that they lacked the ability to incorporate a curriculum based on individual student learning styles into the large educational organization. Since no viable, scalable, practical application beyond a 1:1 teacher student ratio could accommodate and incorporate specific individualized instruction, the concept became dormant until the dawn of the digital age and the integration of information technology.

The Way We LearnIn the early 1980’s Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist, developed the idea that people have many types of intelligences and two of his definitions of intelligence include, “the ability to solve problems that one encounters in real life and the ability to generate new problems to solve” (Christensen, 2008). Gardner identified eight different “intelligences” and ways in which people learn including:

Logical-Mathematical Bodily-Kinesthetic

Musical

Interpersonal Intrapersonal

Naturalist

Linguistic

Spatial

If research has now proven that people have multiple “intelligences” and various individual learning styles, then “a key step toward making school intrinsically motivating is to customize an education to match the way each child best learns” (Christensen, 2008).

If our current instructional model is failing to teach students what they need to learn in order to compete and succeed in a global market then we can no longer afford to maintain the model and we must change.“Standardization clashes with the need for customization in learning. To introduce customization, schools need to move away from monolithic instruction of batches of students toward a modular, student-centric approach using software as an important delivery vehicle” (Christensen, 2008). “The current educational system the way it trains teachers, the way it groups students, the way the curriculum is designed, and the way the school buildings are laid out – is designed for standardization. If the United States is serious about leaving no child behind, it cannot teach its students with standardized methods” (Christensen, 2008). “If the goal is the educate every student-asking schools to ensure that all students have the skills and capabilities to escape the chains of poverty and have an all-American shot at realizing their dreams” as well as compete in a new interconnected global market, we need to identify methods for adopting and integrating “student-centric” instructional models for education (Christensen, 2008).

The Future

According to Peter Drucker in his article The Age of Social Transformation, the new commodity in the knowledge society is education. “The acquisition and distribution of formal knowledge may come to occupy the place in the politics of the knowledge society which the acquisition and distribution of property and income have occupied in our politics over the two or three centuries that we have come to call the Age of Capitalism”(Drucker, 1994). If education is now not just required, but needed in order for the U.S. to maintain a position of strength in the global economy, then we need to ask ourselves whether or not the current education model is achieving this new goal by teaching students the relevant skills they will need to be competitive. If the primary goal of education is in fact to educate U.S. citizens to be competitive in a global market, then we must change, adopt and incorporate a student-centric education model that will teach each student based on how they best learn. With the aid and integration of digital technology we can create software that will help us develop a student-centric curriculum based on individual learning styles. We can create smaller, collaborative, learning groups led by teachers facilitating problem-solving dialogue while being networked to a larger global community. We can teach our children the critical thinking skills they will need to solve future problems that have not even yet developed. We can not only succeed in educating our youth to compete in the global economy, but more importantly thrive in a diverse, networked world. First we need to change our current educational model to one that will enable us to teach based on how each individual child best learns. Only then will we provide a foundation for the next generation to succeed.

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