Learning for the 21st Century

As promised, here is my synthesis of some of the best thinking on 21st century education, as prepared for envisioning the products of the school my trustees and I have been trying to start:

The competences of One World learners

One World learners (OWLs) will prioritize learning to know and learning to do so as to facilitate the innovative, interactive use of tools such as information technology via communication in the English language, thus enabling our students to act autonomously, with a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, in their 21^st century world, while also gaining the social and civic competences to live together in increasingly heterogeneous groups. Their competences will be demonstrated through superior achievements in the priority academic content areas of English, mathematics, science, and additional languages, as well as in the overarching competence of learning to learn, which will be vitally assisted by the students’ digital competence. Such highly competent individuals should go on to succeed in colleges and careers of their own choosing, and eventually finding good work will be a natural outcome of all that our students will have learned to do; and their competence in cultural awareness and expression should durably support their ability to live together successfully in heterogeneous groups while also supporting their most crucial final outcome, their having learned to be One World learners, with the attributes in the ideal profile that follows.

Since One World Secondary School is interested in becoming an IB school, it is appropriate here also to quote from the “IB learner profile”: “The aim of all IB programmes is to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world.”

One World Learners (OWLs) will become

• Disciplined enquirers who have begun mastering the critical thinking- and problem-solving skills and the knowledge necessary to continue to learn within a discipline through enquiry and research. One World students will actively enjoy learning, and their love of learning will be sustained throughout their lives.
• Balanced learners who understand the importance of intellectual, emotional, and physical balance to achieve a good life for themselves and others. In addition, they will study a broad, balanced curriculum, and will analyze, synthesize, and evaluate various ideas derived from the disciplines in a fair, balanced way.
• Caring communicators who convey empathy, compassion, and respect for the needs and feelings of others. One World students will commit themselves to service, and will be able to clearly communicate, orally, in writing, and through modern media, their principled determination to make an ethical contribution to the lives of other people and to the planet as a whole.
• Open-minded initiators who understand their own cultures and histories and are open to those of others. One World students will actively seek out other points of view and, like risk-taking entrepreneurs, will watch for and seize new opportunities, ideas, and strategies for improvement.
• Reflective innovators who develop “right-brain” traits such as curiosity, imagination, and creativity to go with their “left-brain” skills in communication and traditional disciplinary learning. In addition, our students will learn to become reflective on their experience, understanding their own strengths and limitations as they strive towards wisdom.
• Knowledgeable, collaborating leaders who explore great issues, ideas, and concepts, thereby acquiring in-depth knowledge across a broad range of disciplines. They will often acquire necessary information through digital, collaborative enquiry, thereby gaining the computing, ICT, and social skills to responsibly work in teams with networks of people who may come from vastly different cultures and also to use reasoning and persuasion to lead and to learn. 
• Flexible adapters who are ready to change with a changing economy and a changing world. Because they will have become life-long learners, One World graduates will have the self-reliant career skills, productivity, and sense of accountability to deal with our planet’s increasingly complex problems in the 21^st century.

I hereby acknowledge intellectual indebtedness to the works of Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel (21st Century Skills), Howard Gardner (Five Minds for the Future), and Tony Wagner (The Global Achievement Gap) in synthesizing the above profile.

 

How to Choose a Middle School

Peg Tyre has recently published a highly useful book, The Good School. In it she cautions parents that there is no such thing as a perfect school, and even great schools may be hard to find; she argues that they should be happy to find a good school in their neighborhood, and shows how to find one and how to make it better once you've committed to it. Because school choices are steadily increasing, this book is timely.

Parents will inspect to see that the schools under consideration are safe, clean, and conveniently located, and that the pupils, teachers, and managers in them are happy. After these initial considerations, parents should be informed about the schools' curricula, to be assured that their children will not be left behind by the lack of ambition and rigor in the school leaders' educational vision. For example, if a school doesn't start algebra until 9th grade, those students are already finished, in the final outcomes they can expect, with regard to being competitive for selective universities: they won't study calculus in high school, whereas all pupils at One World Secondary School will study at least some calculus, some as early as the tenth grade.  Again, if they don't start learning a new second language before high school, they will not be ready,  for example, for Advanced Placement exams even by the end of 12th grade, much less be ready for content instruction in another subject through the medium of that second language, which is standard practice in European Schools and is also what we are planning for at One World Secondary.

On the Achievement Gap

This is likely to be one of my more heretical posts. I think heretical well chosen here since the notion that all demographic groups of significant size should ideally produce equal achievement test results is so broadly accepted and so little debated in American education as to be the equivalent of canon law. But I will open that debate here with three related theses: (1) I'm not sure the gap can be eliminated, (2) I'm pretty sure it can't by any other than unjust means, and (3) I don't understand why anyone thinks this would be a good thing to achieve in the first place.

The achievement gap is not some new discovery; its investigation goes back to the Coleman Report of 1966, and I have read historians' estimates of it having been far more pronounced, at least between Americans of African ancestry compared with Americans of European ancestry, in 1900 than it was in 2000; and indeed, if you want to see a gap, visit those two continents consecutively, and then reflect on how far the gap has narrowed in this country. But pretty intense efforts to close it have been taking place in American schools for 40 years, with discouragingly little evidence of recent success. I am not here asserting that it cannot be eliminated, merely observing that it doesn't appear that it will happen soon.

Achievement gaps are apparent even before children enter compulsory schooling (first grade), and unless we are willing to have some theoretical totalitarian government control all human reproduction and seize all infants at birth for placement in orphanages, we are unlikely to eliminate those gaps prior to first grade. So the only way to eliminate a pre-established gap would be to (1) eliminate all private education, including homeschooling and tutoring, and then (2) make unequal distributions of public educational resources (such as time allowed for and quality of instruction) so as to favor those who enter school behind, to enable them to catch up. Now look at the next bright six-year-old you see from an education-loving family, and then look at that child's mother or father, who has perhaps been diligently reading in bed to the child and playing educational games with her or him since she or he was a toddler; do you really want to discriminate against such young human beings so early in life, for the sin of growing up in a family that values education highly? Or are you going to wait until later to start handicapping that child so as to achieve your social vision?   

My parents valued education highly; evidence of such was the subscription to National Geographic which appeared on the glass coffee table in our middle class living room, and I used to read it periodically as I was growing up. I remember reading about travelling on the Siberian Express when the Soviet Union was showing periodic glimmers of opening up to the rest of the world. During the Glasnost period of the 1980s, this journey sounded at first like one of the most romantic in the world; but through the account of the Western journalist undertaking the trip, we learned that it was one of the dreariest. Town after town, village after village, station after station, for 8000 miles (13,000 kilometres), through what in a non-totalitarian state should have been nine time zones, came and went, all exactly alike, the achievement of a Soviet state that prized equality, not just of opportunity but also of condition and outcome, before all else, at least in theory (less so in fact, we later learned).

Isn't the idea that there should be no achievement gap; that people of all races and ethnicities, of all backgrounds, linguistic, religious and otherwise, that all their family cultures should be rendered irrelevant and counteracted, and that all students should achieve exactly alike in every subject, a Soviet theory of education?