Several years ago, my parents added “in-law” quarters on to my house with the intention of eventually moving in. But they still love their house in Kentucky, and their independence, and enjoy good health and so for now, the addition serves as a wonderfully convenient space for them to utilize when visiting. We enjoyed their longest consecutive stay-- from Sunday through Thanksgiving Thursday -- last week.
During that time, my mom was determined to get the old cordless phones they had brought up a couple of years ago working so that we all would have a convenient method of contacting each other while in separate parts of the house. Not through phone calls -- I got rid of a landline years ago -- but through the intercom feature that connected the base set with the extensions. |
After a significant investment of time and energy, my parents determined that each phone would need a new battery, that only one store in the area still sold those type of batteries, and that each would cost about $15 to replace. Reluctantly, my mom agreed not to invest any more into the out-dated phones. After all, it is 2016 and we do have cell phones [all of us except my 7-year old step-daughter, who truly would have loved the novelty of the phone in her room -- but with Christmas coming up she’ll be getting a cell phone for her room soon too (shhh, don’t tell!)]
Which brought me to these questions ..
Where are we doing this in education? In what ways are we investing in the past rather than in the future?
Until just recently, I would have argued that schools and classrooms who were not utilizing digital technology were not investing in the future -- past equaled textbooks and lecture and using pencils; future was internet and online learning and digital creation tools. But the more I have investigated education reform, as I’ve watched my own children navigate elementary and middle school, having worked in a personalized-learning charter school, and now developing and delivering eLearning Professional Development, I think those are greatly oversimplified.
Now I think that the “past” is advancement through school based on age; ranking-based grading, content-driven instruction, requiring conformity, and teaching students how to get the right answers. The “future” is progression based on readiness, mastery/competency/standards-based grading, instruction to drive skill-development, encouraging initiative and innovation, and helping students learn how to ask good questions. But reaching this future vision requires that the education system we have experienced for over a century undergoes drastic changes, like forgoing 18 years of schooling for every student, awarding letter grades, focusing on standardized testing, and centralizing student learning within brick-and-mortar classrooms.
Now I think that the “past” is advancement through school based on age; ranking-based grading, content-driven instruction, requiring conformity, and teaching students how to get the right answers. The “future” is progression based on readiness, mastery/competency/standards-based grading, instruction to drive skill-development, encouraging initiative and innovation, and helping students learn how to ask good questions. But reaching this future vision requires that the education system we have experienced for over a century undergoes drastic changes, like forgoing 18 years of schooling for every student, awarding letter grades, focusing on standardized testing, and centralizing student learning within brick-and-mortar classrooms.
Cell phones are an example of the kind of disruptive technology that Clayton Christensen described starting in 1995 -- at first, there was a very limited market, but eventually the new product thoroughly unseated the landline phone business. In 2008, Christensen brought these ideas to the education realm with the book Disrupting Class, in which he argued that online education has the potential to fundamentally change the current education system. Seven years later, in the article “Is K-12 Blended Learning Disruptive? An introduction to the theory of hybrids,” he pointed out that there are many examples of disruption within classes, but few at school levels, and a very long, slow road ahead to seeing the change on a state or national scale.
But you know, if we didn’t have cell phones, the $60 investment in batteries for the cordless phones might have seemed worth it compared to the greater than $600 cost of a new smartphone. Of course, we didn’t just jump from cordless to smartphones (my mom still carries a flip phone). Though change and progress take time and money, it has to start somewhere. What if companies hadn’t taken risk on cellular technology when it was first introduced? |
Without the ability to execute a drastic and expensive overhaul of education as we know it (especially when there is risk involved!), how do we make future, rather than past, investments? No simple answers of course, but here is a good starting place: Future Ready Schools