From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom

Hopeful Essays for 21st Century Learning

Marc R. Prensky

• Editore: Corwin
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781452284194
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Bildung
• Categoria: Bildungstechnologie

An expert perspective on 21st century education

What can you learn on a cell phone? Almost anything! How does that concept fit with our traditional system of education? It doesn’t. Best-selling author and futurist MarcPrensky’s book of essays challenges educators to “reboot” and make the changes necessary to prepare students for 21st century careers and living. His “bottom-up” vision includes students’ ideas about what they need from teachers, schools, and education. Also featured are easy-to-do, high-impact classroom strategies that help students acquire “digital wisdom.” This thought-provoking text is organized into two sections that address:

• Rethinking education (including what and how we teach and measuring learning)
• 21st century learning and technology in the classroom (including games, YouTube, and more)

PART 1

Rethinking Education

1

The Reformers Are Leaving Our Schools in the 20th Century

Why most U.S. school reformers are on the wrong track, and how to get our kids’ education right for the future

Published in SNS Newsletter

I was compelled to write this opening essay after watching our leaders, again and again, offer solutions to our educational problems that left our education, and our children, mired in the past. My previous experience as a business strategy consultant helped me see, as I had for other industries, just how little of what we currently do—that is, of the education we provide to our children—helps us reach our goals and meet our future needs. I view our biggest educational need not as raising test scores, but as preparing our children for the future (although often conflated, those goals are not the same). Moreover, unfortunately, in today’s world, those goals are increasingly at odds. This essay provides my overview of this dysfunctional situation and its causes, and offers, in a big-picture view, my solutions for fixing it. (Note: I have made one significant change to the original published version: my original “3 C’s” are now the “3 P’s.” I made this change when I found that someone else had already proposed a different 3 C’s.)

What President Obama said:
“We need to out-educate.”

What Obama should have said:
“We can’t win the future with the education of the past.”

This is an unprecedented time in U.S. education, and awareness that we have a problem has never been higher. Billions of dollars of public and private money are lined up for solutions. But I am convinced that, with our present course, when all that momentum and money is spent, we shall nonetheless end up with an educational system that is incapable of preparing the bulk of our students for the issues and realities they will face in the 21st century.

The reason is that the educational improvement efforts now in place are aimed at bringing back the education that America offered students in the 20th century (with some technological enhancements). Sadly, too many people assume this is still the “right” education for today, although it no longer works for most of our students. Despite the many educational projects and programs now being funded and offered, practically no effort is being made to create and implement a better, more future-oriented education for all of our kids.

However well meaning those who propose and fund today’s educational reforms may be, their aim is generally to improve something that is obsolete. They are obsessed by the “sit up straight, pay attention, take notes” fantasy of education past. “Discipline” (as opposed to self-discipline, or passion) is heard a lot—Obama used it in his 2010 State of the Union speech. It does not matter how much money these reformers spend; because they are pursuing the wrong goal, their efforts are doomed to failure.

Even if, as result of such efforts, some students achieve better test scores, the current reforms will not solve our real educational problems, which are related not to test scores, but to the future. No matter how innovative programs to improve scores may appear on the surface, it is money being thrown away. If we continue on our current course, we could, in the words of Mark Anderson, “even double or triple the amount being spent, and it wouldn’t move the meter one iota.”

The tragedy is that if we used the money and momentum now available with the right focus and effort, our students’ education could be made real, valuable, and useful for the future—and fairly easily.

It wouldn’t take that much work to decide what should be done—most educators could, I believe, come to consensus. But to get those changes accepted by a majority of our citizens, and to make them actually happen, will require much effort and change on the part of our educational and political leaders. It will also require some new thinking by many, including parents. That is where today’s so-called education “reformers”—from Barack Obama to Arne Duncan to Bill Gates to Newt Gingrich—should be, in my opinion, focusing their efforts.

Fix the Education, Not the System

Currently, lots of money is being spent on trying to fix the educational “system.” But what the reformers haven’t yet understood is that it’s not the “system” that we need to get right; it’s the education that the system provides. This distinction is critical, because one can change almost everything about the “system”—the schools, the leaders, the teachers, the number of hours and days of instruction, and so forth—and still not provide an education that interests our students and gets them deeply engaged in their own learning, or that teaches all of our students what they need to be successful in their 21st century lives.

Unless we change how things are taught and what is taught, in all of our classrooms, we won’t be able to provide an education that has our kids fighting to be in school rather than one that effectively pushes one-third to one-half of them out. And this is true for all our kids, both advantaged and disadvantaged.

Most politicians—along with many education reformers—mistakenly believe that our current public school education, designed for an earlier, industrial age, is basically okay, although currently poorly implemented: if we can just find the teachers to teach it right, the thinking goes, and get our students to go through it, they will do better in life as a result. That may once have been the case for most students, but it no longer is. The context, the world, and our kids’ educational needs have changed radically, and we need a fresh approach to education.

In part because we “got it right” in the past, the reformers believe that education should remain essentially the same in the lifetimes and careers of today’s students as it was in theirs. So the way to fix our current educational issues is to return to what they see as the “fundamentals” of education: its 20th century incarnation.

Whether couched in terms of values, character building, or behaviors, and whether or not they allow some contemporary technology to be squeezed in, the reformers fundamentally believe that they can bring back “what once worked.” (That it ever worked for all, of course, is a myth.) That belief has tragic ramifications for our students today.

It is tragic not because those goals are unimportant for the future. We certainly should preserve, in appropriate quantities, the core values and most useful ideas from the past. It is tragic, rather, because so much of what we do currently teach, and what so many want to preserve, is now unimportant because the context for education has changed so radically.

In the current environment, every field and job—from factory work to retail to healthcare to hospitality to garbage collection—is in the process of being transformed dramatically, and often unrecognizably, by technology and other forces. And while most reformers recognize that society is going through dramatic changes (even though few truly “get” their extent, speed, and implications), they too often—and paradoxically—do not see the need for education to change fundamentally to cope with them.

When politicians, administrators, or even parents believe that succeeding at our current education (i.e., memorizing the multiplication tables, mastering the long division algorithm, being good at paper-book reading, and studying science, history, and civics in traditional ways) is what is important for today’s and tomorrow’s students, they put those students at a huge disadvantage relative to the fast-changing future.

When our leaders think that the job of educators is to re-create the old education better and more effectively for today’s students, they deny our students the means to cope and thrive in the 21st century. When they think success at education is moving our kids up in the international PISA (Program for International Assessment) rankings, they send the message that they want our students to compete in the past.

In other words, the educational medicine most prescribed today—the test-scores-driven, tenure-busting, results-rewarding (in the words of Judith Warner of the New York Times) fix of Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and others—will not result in our kids getting the right education, even if it reaches whatever goals they set, because it treats the wrong disease.

Assessment: The Big Gorilla

To deal right away with the “big gorilla” of assessment: I believe that assessment is important, if used correctly, for helping both students and teachers improve. But in the current debate, it leads us away from what we could be doing to actually improve our kids’ future.

The much-bandied-about, high-stakes assessments of today are poorly designed, used badly, and give us wrong information. They are poorly designed, despite their claimed statistical sophistication, because they measure things no longer valuable, do not measure many increasingly valuable skills at all, and rely overly on a discredited approach to assessment (i.e., multiple choice questioning). They are used badly because they serve only to rank, and do not provide useful feedback to students and teachers to help them improve. They give wrong information in that they often measure not what kids know, but rather their test-taking abilities.

There are plenty of ways to do assessment differently—and more gently—with much better and more accurate results. For example, Microsoft and other companies are currently at work on assessments that measure student-led learning, as well as assessments that are integrated within the learning process (in ways often similar to how video games assign players “levels” based on accomplishments). Unfortunately, today our high-stakes, standardized testing has become so over-hyped that it is hard to be against such testing and still be for good assessment. The for-profit testing companies, whose executive ranks—perhaps not surprisingly—include many of those who, while in government, pushed the current testing programs, have now become a strong lobby for the current testing regime.

Don’t Blame the Teachers (or Students)

Sadly, the biggest consequence of the reformers’ false belief that 20th century education can be made to work if only it’s better implemented has been the serious, continual, and unwarranted attacks on our two most valuable educational resources: our 55 million students, who are our future, and the 3 million adults who courageously choose to teach them. Talk about bullying! These are the people we should be nurturing and helping, rather than beating up.

The failure of the 20th century approach is not the fault of our teachers. While there are clearly some who are not suited to the profession, in the main our 3 million teachers are people of competence and good will. And while there is certainly room for improvement, most are just trying to accomplish, often against their will and better judgment, what the old education asks and mandates of them—that is, to “cover” the curriculum and raise test scores. The teachers I talk to are enormously frustrated by the fact that, while seeing that what they’re told to do is not succeeding, they are handcuffed from doing anything else. If we take off those handcuffs and provide a better alternative, most teachers will, I believe, be eager to implement it.

Nor are students to blame for our educational problems. Young people are biologically programmed to always be learning something. The real problem is an education that gives neither the teachers nor the students a chance to succeed. Even if we are successful, as Arne Duncan hopes, in recruiting talented people to replace the 1 million teachers expected to retire, the education model they will be expected to deliver will almost certainly discourage them and beat them down, causing a large percentage to leave.

It also doesn’t do our students much good to try to graft lots of “21st century skills” onto existing school programs, while leaving “core” education in place as is—the approach of the Partnership for 21st Century Education, for example. Yes, those skills are important, and adding them is fine, in theory. But unfortunately, our “core” is so overloaded with out-of-date content that it is already impossible to deliver all the things teachers are supposed to in the time they are given. So just adding more skills to the list—even crucial ones—will not work. As I describe later in this essay, we must delete first.

How Much Do Charter Schools Help to Build “21st Century Skills”?

We hear a lot about charters as models of what education in the United States could and should be. But even in that percentage of charter schools and others where the old system has been resuscitated—i.e., gotten kids to sit attentively, listening to teachers lecture about the 20th century curriculum—it does little good for our students in the long term. While it may create students who are ready for further advancement in that same system, and it may even get them into college, it does precious little to prepare them for the rest of their lives. In addition, there is no way structurally we could create enough charter schools to replace all our current schools—and college may not be the right goal for every student.

To get to where we want, and need, to go with our children’s education, I don’t beli...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART 1. RETHINKING EDUCATION
• PART 2. 21ST CENTURY LEARNING, AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM
• Epilogue: From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom
• Final Note
• Credits
• Index