There is growing recognition that the world today is defined by change, complexity and hyper-connectedness, and that education systems are falling behind in terms of equipping young people with the skills that are essential to thriving in the world and to making the world a better place. What is your perspective on this?
The world is certainly becoming increasingly ambiguous and volatile. But I believe people have probably always struggled with change. What is new is that the kind of things that are easy to teach and easy to test—the kind of routine cognitive skills—are also easy to digitize, automate and outsource. We find ourselves in the same situation that people with routine skills found themselves in during the Industrial Revolution. A lot of people are losing their jobs because the kind of ways we used to work and think are no longer relevant. That’s what the digital revolution does to many of the skills that are very well established in education today.
The question is: how do we respond to this? How do we equip people with the skills that are essential in the modern world? Not as an alternative to disciplinary contexts, in my view. You can teach creativity in mathematics, problem-solving in mathematics, social skills in mathematics. We need to think about what kind of skills we want to develop—and how to use established disciplines to develop these skills.
In the past, it was about building relationships with your family and immediate network. Today it’s about building relationships with people who may think differently from you—who may look at the world in a very different way, who come from a different disciplinary specialization. Economic success today is very much about you being able to collaborate, compete and connect with people.
It requires the capacity to see the world through different lenses, to appreciate different value systems, to respect different cultures. And those people who are able to do that will find their way through this kind of world. Those people who struggle with this will see the world as threatening to them; they will see globalization as something happening to them, rather than them being part of it.
So how can we develop these kinds of essential skills systematically?
Think about curiosity, for example. How can you write that into a curriculum? Well, you can create the space in the curriculum to develop curiosity, but in the end, it’s really about innovative teaching and innovative practice. It’s about teachers understanding how students learn these skills—and how to support them to learn in their individual learning styles.
But that’s very hard to institutionalize. It must come down to building teaching capacity. Building motivation. Giving the space and the support they need to learn from other great teachers. Making sure their ideas are feeding back to improve the system and shape professional practices. Building a much higher degree of professional autonomy, but in a collaborative culture.
Are there any countries that are leading the way with this type of approach to teaching?
In Shanghai, they have a platform where teachers share their lesson plans. You upload your lesson plans, and you get more and more popular the more other teachers comment on your lessons, criticize them, improve them, etc. So you’re evaluated by the system, not only on your own work in the classroom, but by the contribution you make to the education system.
And in Japan and in parts of China, they have become very good at creating collaborative spaces, in which teachers work together to plan lessons and design lessons. Teachers become not only implementation agents, but also designers of instructional systems—and that creates a very different kind of mindset.
Also published on Medium.