I have been wondering what it is that I will take away from the conference I have been attending for the last few days. Some great speakers have talked and some amazing ideas have flowed. It has challenged me and made me reflect as a teacher and emerging leader. So many strands to pull together and a lot to think about and implement going forward. I have a lot of work to do.
What I realised though is that actually we all have a lot of
work to do. One of the biggest underlying themes was an idea that was delivered
on the first day by keynote Daniel Pink – the idea of a new metric. The idea
that we are measuring success and achievement without actually measuring the
parts that count. It is a hell of an idea. To come up with a yardstick that
accurately measures the things we as a community want our students to leave
school with - which is significantly more than the reading, writing and maths
of previous generations, because having those skills is simply not enough
anymore.
I am wondering very hard about what to do with this
staggering new piece of information. I am trying to ask the right questions and
am, at this stage, struggling to gain coherence. I suspect I need more time to
think about it but am thinking that the conference has helped clarify some steps
forward. First I think we have to top banging the 21st century
learning drum. Get over it – it’s here and has been for as long as all our
students have been at school. No student now knows what it was like to learn in
the 20th century. The skills and ideas that people have anointed 21st
century have been around for significantly longer than the last 12 years too. I
think we need to give up on putting them into the futuristic holy grail goal
category, and just set them alongside the basic literacy and numeracy skills
that our governments seem so intent on testing and measuring.
The next step in developing a new metric is to tell everyone
we are going to do it. It follows that if we set such things as problem solving
and collaboration alongside the literacy and numeracy then we need to tell our
communities that these are the things that are valued as equally as the skills
they know (and seem to love). We then need to articulate to the community what
these skills are and give some solid reasons why we need to develop them in our
students. This I think might be a bit of a chicken and egg debate here as the
easiest way to convince people is to show them the numbers, and we can’t show
them the numbers very well yet because we don’t have the metric. I don’t believe
it to be insurmountable though. In Lee Corckett’s Keynote he showed us quite
compellingly data showing the decline in industrial, agricultural and service
work over the last hundred years or so and pointed to surveys of businesses that
list the 21st century skills that we need to develop.
I think that the final plank in our goal to develop a
measure is to start trying and sharing our results with others. I am a big fan
of beta testing. It doesn't have to be right – or even mostly right as long as
we state clearly what we are trying to achieve and why we are doing it. If we
do this then we can let the collective wisdom of the community help us develop
a metric that has meaning and value to all.
I think this is the part where I conclude by highlighting my
idea for the measure. The truth is – I haven’t got one yet. I have no idea how
it would look. But I do know how I am
going to start. I can do this in my classroom immediately by recognizing the
skills of the future are not of the future, they are of the now and need equal
footing in my classroom. I can also start having conversations with people about how we measure what everyone says is important. Lastly, I'll beta test - put something out there for my class to look at. See if we can use it, see what needs to be changed and if it doesn't work - try again.
I'm sure I'll visiting this issue again. For now though I just have to be content that I have the start of an idea and the only way it'll go anywhere is if I do something with it.
