By: Stephen Portz
“The Wemmicks were
small wooden people… carved by a woodworker named Eli…his workshop sat on a
hill overlooking the village. Each
Wemmick was different…each and every day the Wemmicks did the same thing… up
and down the streets people spent their days sticking stars or dots on one
another… the talented ones got stars… others though, could do little. They got dots. Puchinello was one of these… after a while he
had so many dots that he didn’t want to go outside. He was afraid he would do something dumb… and
people would give him another dot…
Lucado, M. (1997). You
Are Special. Crossway Books, Wheton,
IL.
It is very
interesting where we place our values in education. Take the typical academic skills based test
after it has been administered and look closely at the results. We use written tests in an attempt to measure
what students have learned, but what did the test really measure? If the student was not a good reader, the
student would have struggled to read the questions and would have scored poorly
on the test; but would that have been an accurate indicator that the student
didn’t know the tested material? Clearly,
it would not be an accurate indicator.
What if the material was presented verbally and the student didn’t hear
well or had some other processing deficit - would this be an accurate indicator
of their mastery of the material? Again,
of course not, and in fact, teachers work very hard to identify and make
special compensatory consideration for such students.
What about
students who think and learn differently?
As teachers, we put a lot of stock in our ability to choose what we will
emphasize and the instructional delivery methods that we will use. These decisions are based largely on our own
learning styles, with little or no consideration for our learners. To begin to think about the learning styles
of others, consider this excerpt from the life of Helen Keller:
“Our
favorite walk was to Keller’s Landing, an old tumble-down lumber-warf on the Tennessee River, used during the Civil War to land
soldiers. There we spent many happy
hours and played at learning geography.
I built dams of pebbles, made islands and lakes, and dug riverbeds, all
for fun, and never dreamed that I was learning a lesson. I listened with increasing wonder to Miss
Sullivan’s descriptions of the great round world with its burning mountains,
buried cities, moving rivers of ice, and many other things as strange. She made raised maps in clay, so that I could
feel the mountain ridges and valleys, and follow with my fingers the devious
course of rivers. I liked this too; but
the division of the earth into zones and poles confused and teased my mind. The illustrative strings and the orange stick
representing the poles seemed so real that even to this day the mere mention of
temperate zone suggests twine circles…”
Keller, H. (1960). The
Story Of My Life.
This passage
serves as such a moving account on the value of teaching and learning in
different ways and while penned from a blind and deaf author, is amazingly rife
with visual imagery. While it is beyond
dispute that learning for Helen Keller posed unique challenges, one can not
help but feel envious of this description of how Helen’s teacher taught her
using many unconventional tactile methods.
In this way, Helen was given the learning method tailored to match her
learning style, not necessarily the method or style that was convenient for the
teacher.
We can
probably remember a time in our educational past when we first understood a
difficult concept, like solving an algebra word problem, balancing a chemical
equation, or conjugating verbs in another language, after had it explained many
times previously to no avail. It might
have taken another student, a parent, or even a different teacher explaining it
to us in a different way for our own epiphany to occur. The only thing that was missing for us was a
different way of approaching the problem, a different way of processing it, a
method that would resonate with our learning style, which helped us to better
understand.
Academic versus
Practical
These issues
began to concern me as I tested students over material that had been presented
in my vocational technology classes. As
might be imagined, students with a history of high academic success did the
best on written tests. What I found surprising was in many instances students
who scored lower on tests did much better and some even outperformed the
academically gifted students when it came to a practical performance appraisal
such as a project or applied skill.
These two observations taken together, made me start questioning why it
was I did things a certain way, and what was it about a curriculum delivery style
that made such a difference in student populations?
It seemed
that students that performed well academically had better reading, memory,
conceptualization, and auditory processing skills, while students who performed
better in practicum testing, had better visual learning, spatial relationships,
manual dexterity, and contextual learning skills. When I considered my purpose as a vocational
educator, a major component being to prepare the future work force of our
country, I began to look long and hard into what evaluative methods are really
credible with regard to the demands of the workplace.
For example,
if in teaching my students how to create engineering drawings, we spent a large
portion of the class in the lab developing our drawing skills, it seems a
little ridiculous to turn around at the end of a semester and give pen and
paper multiple choice test on how to theoretically do the work. Obviously, with the ability to actually do
something having so much more importance over knowing how to do something, it
was clear to me that most of my evaluations should be practical in nature.
Interesting
things started to happen when I began using this evaluation method. Students that were unaccustomed to getting
really good grades on their report card became “better students.” Not only did
they fare better in the class because of a greater emphasis being placed on
doing instead of knowing, but they improved in academic measurements as
well. That is, I witnessed improvement
in confidence levels and this improved confidence spilled over into their academic
abilities.
"It wasn’t that the students
somehow got smarter over night; it was just that there was a greater sense of
buy in and attentiveness when students could see direct correlation between the
projects based learning and the academic aspects of the activity. Connections were being made."
The Applied Model
As
I experimented with these methods, some interesting points about learning
started becoming very clear to me: It
goes without saying that knowing and doing are
two different things, just as having a skill and being able to apply a skill
are different. This was first brought to
my attention while I was teaching a 9th grade Industrial Skills
class. The class was composed largely of
advanced standing students as most were taking geometry a year ahead of
schedule – which means that they had already done well in Algebra I. We had just completed a bottle rocketry unit
and had acquired data from launch performance and we were going to do an
academic tie in to see if students made the necessary connections.
As part of
data we collected, we wanted to try to attribute the amount of pressure that we
used to pump up the bottle with the rocket’s performance in flight. I asked these “upper level” math students
that if thrust was equal to the PSI of the air filling the bottle divided by
the area of the nozzle opening, what would be the units of our answer? I wrote the following on the board:
Pounds * IN^2 =
IN^2
The students sat there and stared at me blankly. I got a crazy thought and wondered if maybe I
knew the cause of their confusion so I wrote the following equation on the
board and asked again what units the answer would be:
X * Y^2 =
Y^2
Immediately the students responded the units would be ‘X.’ We
then went back and applied the same logic to the first set up and they figured
it out. Nevertheless, I found it
troubling that students could perform the skill in isolation, as a theoretical
book exercise, but they could not transport the exact same skill into a real
world problem.
This experience
made me start thinking why algebra concepts, and for that matter any academic
concept, should be taught as an isolated skill with no application - especially
in light of the fact that so many students don’t learn very well in this
way. To some, this strategy of using the
context of a project, or a central idea for applying what you know, is called
thematic or holistic learning. In my experience, most people learn better this
way and it should be something that every teacher should consider very seriously
in their scheme of instructional delivery.
Only a portion of students will be successful in a traditionally
delivered academic class, but it is my belief that everyone can be successful
in a project-based holistic class.
I started to
share these thoughts with other teachers and discovered some troubling
attitudes with regard to this applied versus academic proposition. A science instructor agreed that more of the
students would understand the concepts if taught in their application, but that
it would water down the class and make it so everyone could succeed. After I got past the interesting thought that
a fellow teacher would have about being concerned that too many students were
“getting it,” he clarified his statement:
The reason why material is presented conceptually instead of in its
application, is to filter the class to see who is college ready, and who is
not. If everybody in the class
understands the material and gets good grades, then the students who learn best
in application get the notion that they can go to college, and that would be
giving them the wrong idea.
"So, to
elaborate on this logic a bit, we deliberately structure a class to make it
difficult for the majority of the students to understand and function
successfully, because that is the way colleges do it. Instead of presenting material in the context
in which it will be used, that is, by application, where the greatest number of
students can understand it, we deliberately present material conceptually,
where only a certain percentage can understand it. These students we will deem
college worthy."
To
illustrate this point further, consider another experience: I was visiting with a college math professor
friend at a camp out. We were talking
about education and I told him that I was beginning to question the status quo
in the way we were doing things. I felt
this way because I was finding so many really bright people who were not
“typical college prep” students and I wondered if we were doing right by
them. We structure classes and define
curriculum so much by what colleges are doing.
There is a whole other world of people, the majority in fact, which may
be gifted with great ability but aren’t as successful in school because they
simply don’t think and learn in the same way that their teachers do.
He admitted
that he couldn’t relate to what I was talking about because he had always done
well in school and his PhD in mathematics was proof. The concept of even recognizing that there
were students that learned differently and weren’t just stupid or lazy was
seemingly lost on him. Interestingly, a
very ironic thing occurred as we broke camp and moved out of the
campground. Our caravan had to pass
through a locked cattle gate. His car
was in the lead so he got out of the car to open the lock but he couldn’t work
the lock. It wasn’t stuck or difficult,
it was just a simple tumbler-style combination lock, but he couldn’t unlock it.
Evidently, he had no mechanical abilities whatsoever. As I watched someone else from the group have
to get out and open the lock for him, the thought came to me of how different
the world would have been for this professor if education had been geared
around mechanical principles, and things that he evidently did not have an
innate function for. Maybe he would have
had to struggle in such a world, much like the students that didn’t do so well
in his classes had to struggle.
Turning the Tables
Changing the
emphasis in my classes has had the effect of turning things around on some of
the students that are used to doing well in a class using the typical academic
model. The results have been very
interesting. When I used authentic
assessment and project based evaluations instead of conceptual paper and pencil
testing, I could see the anxiety levels of some of the high academic achieving
students start to go up.
A mother of
a gifted student came in to see me because her student was struggling in
technology class. “Struggling” in this case, meant not absolutely positive that
they were getting an ‘A’ in the class. The grades for the class were based on
the students’ understanding of underlying mechanical principles from the
experiments that they would perform, and then the successful building of
motorized models using Lego manipulatives.
She took exception to the fact that I could grade in this way because it
was selective against her child who didn’t have a lot of experience working
with Legos.
This
experience made me wonder if the logic worked backwards. That is, if because her child had exceptional
reading ability and that gave them an advantage over other students, that we
should rule out evaluations of this nature because it was selective over
students not having the same experiences or abilities in reading.
Truly Gifted
But the
clincher for all of these thoughts mulling around in my head came into focus
when I was privileged to have in class one of the most gifted students that I
have ever known. I will call him Jeremy
though it is not his real name. Jeremy
usually did poorly with written work and would rather not do the activity than
struggle through it. It goes without
saying that academic testing went much the same way and he had a tough time
passing the standardized testing to fulfill graduation requirements. But, when it came to projects, Jeremy was a
whiz. He did amazingly creative work
with his mind and with his hands and demonstrated high levels of craftsmanship
in articulating his ideas in the solution to many different problems. He dominated every project based activity in
a way that I have never before witnessed.
The majority of the students in that class were, what I would consider
typical college prep material, and about a fourth of the class was classified
as “gifted.” It didn’t matter who the competition was, he outmatched them all
with his innovative work.
This got me
to thinking even more. If Jeremy isn’t
the perfect poster child for multiple intelligences doctrine, then I don’t
think one exists. When Howard Gardner,
professor of education at Harvard
University, came up with
the concept of the existence of multiple intelligences for learners, we all
nodded our heads and agreed with his premise. Furthermore, we claim to value
and embrace diversity in learners, but then we continue to use the same
academic evaluation model; a model I might add, which neglects to recognize and
measure almost any other type of “intelligence,” as revealed by Gardner.
Ever since
having this experience, it has been difficult for me to say the word “gifted,”
when referring to academically gifted students, without a touch of sarcasm in
my voice, when I consider how really gifted Jeremy was.
Current Knowledge About
Thinking and Learning and the Brain
Present technologies allow researchers to nonintrusively
peer inside the human brain as it functions.
They can ask similar questions of different representative groups and
then physically observe how these individuals process information
differently. In a humorously titled
article USA Today reports: “MRI Scans confirm that men have half a mind
not to listen.” The report from the
University of Indiana School of Medicine was presented at a meeting of the
Radiological Society of North America in November of 2000. It documented in part that men and women
display markedly different brain activity when performing the same task. Women use much more of their brain and the
processing activity is prevalent throughout both hemispheres. Men on the other hand, have very localized
processing activity in only one hemisphere.
The corpus collosum which is the neural band that connects the right and
left hemispheres of the brain together, is larger in female brain and would
suggest an improved ability in cross hemispherical communication for
women. As pointed out by the study’s
co-author, Bennett Shaywitz, the research confirms what people have suspected
for years about the differences in processing for the male and female brain.
The differences in brain processing which men and women
experience is only part of the story and bespeaks of the critical importance of
teaching in an enriched learning environment which supports many different
types of instruction. The types of
applied learning activities and active project based instruction that is
typically found in lab-based classes is of special importance because it gives
the latitude to learn and express in methods and modes that are suited to each
learner. Young learners in particular,
have special brain functioning needs which are not being properly addressed. Since the brain needs a large supply of
oxygen rich blood, it typically consumes 20% of the total energy of the body,
students should not be consigned to long periods of time in inactive passive
learning. These findings appear to
further support movement and doing in an active learning lab environment.
“There are only three places in our society where we
continually insist on lengthy periods of immobility – prisons, mental
hospitals, and schools.”
-Ken Wesson
With regard to how learning takes place in the brain
there is a clear distinction between learning something and just memorizing
it. Brain research is proving how
permanent learning connections are made.
Interestingly, scientists have discovered that sleep plays a very
important role in learning and “unlearning, or forgetting.” It is very interesting
that it is not so much the body that needs sleep, it is the brain. Sleep is needed for the brain to relax and
construct context of all the information that the mind has processed during the
day. The brain sorts all the information
from the day and determines which information is important by the number of
connectors that were constructed in the form of dendrites (neural
connections). Information that is not
judged as important in its utility and application will not have been
adequately connected in the brain with past learning. Such information is circumspectly pruned from
the brain and “forgotten.” “Only those
brain cells in the visual cortex with linkages to the active visual pathways
are allowed to survive the ongoing ‘pruning down’ and ‘linking up’
process.” These insights into learning
and the brain would seem to further ratify the concept of applied contextual
learning for improved retention.
Wesson, K. (2000). “What Everyone Should Know About the Latest
Brain Research.” Ties Magazine. Ewing,
NJ. Nov/Dec 2000.
What is Really Needed
My
father-in-law retired as Chief Scientist for Lockheed while working in their
classified programs for the Department of Defense. He would relate how numerous college
graduates from prestigious universities would want to break into his
development team and work with him. They would begin listing their credentials
by stating, “I was the top of my class at such and such university.” He would reply to them that, unfortunately,
they were the last people that he wanted to have working for him.
“Because,” he would tell them, “all that
tells me about you is that you were able to regurgitate back to your professors
everything that they ever told you. And
for that, you have been patted on the head and told how wonderful you
are.”
The real
skills that he needed for his development team were, common sense, intuition,
and good problem solving abilities, but more importantly, the ability to
consider situations, which involve questions, as well as solutions, that have
never been considered before – that is, pure creative thought and projecting
the future applications of the technologies before and as they are
developed. This is the essence of
quadrant D thinking - more on this will be discussed in chapter 4.
All of these
examples illustrate my point - which student, do you think, is the American
workforce really looking for, especially in light of global economic warfare?
What skills do they really need? People
who score high on tests, or people who prove they have strong problem solving
skills in work related environments? Why
do colleges perpetuate the notion that academic skills are pre-eminent and
conceptual knowledge is more important than applied ability? Why do our schools continue to teach abstract
skill after abstract skill, with admittedly no correlation to work place needs,
simply because – “you will need to know this for college?”
“Our students can solve a quadratic
equation, but they can’t figure out how many 2 x 4’s they need for a backyard
deck project.”
-Jim Ebbert, Mathematics Instructor
Fantasy Math
This is not
to say that we don’t ever see any “real world” skill applications in academia -
there are many occasions when teachers try to introduce applications into the
concepts that are taught. The problem
is, so few people that make up these problems have actually “worked” for a
living, and have first hand experience with the kinds of applied problems that
are encountered in a work environment, that to construct a hypothetical work
related problem takes about as much imagination for them as envisioning life on
Pluto does for the rest of us. Consider
these few examples of the kinds of problems that we give our students:
- I looked over a high school student’s shoulder one day and saw he was working on a factoring handout. As he solved a series of factoring problems, one of the numbers was to be placed below in a puzzle that solved another problem about which silk worm would win a race. I guess the handout is memorable to me because I wasn’t aware that silk worms had such a great propensity for racing. It also occurred to me that here is a high school student, an upper classman, who is desperately trying to prepare to go out into the world and make a living and he is solving problems about silk worm racing. Maybe, he is going to grow up to be a bookie.
- My daughter came home from high school one day and told me about a physics test question. It went something like this: bicycle A is traveling north at 10 km per hour, bicycle B is traveling south at 20 km per hour. The bikes are 15 km apart. A fly between the bikes is traveling 25 km per hour. If the fly starts at bike A and travels toward bike B, how many times can it travel back and forth between the bikes before it is squashed by the two bikes as they collide?
If the first
thing that comes to your mind about these two examples is, “what does this have
to do with anything?” then, I guess I am on track with this. What do you suppose assigning problems like
these subconsciously communicates to our students? Perhaps, that there are not enough real world
applications out there, problems that our students will one day really have to
solve, that we have to make up fantasy math problems like this to engage them?
The Value of Writing
Technically
Up until
now, most examples of things that we can do to help more students gain needed
workplace skills involve the way we teach math, but our English classes can
look at the way they are doing things to improve workplace relevance as well.
In working
closely with Language Arts teachers in grant writing and on other committees, I
have had the opportunity to pick their brains about how writing is taught. I remembered having to take a technical
writing class in my college program. It
was one of the best classes that I ever had, mostly because the instructor was
a hands on sort of person who fancied himself one day writing for Field and Stream. So when he gave us things to write about,
like a procedure for how to crack a bull whip, he actually brought in a bull
whip and demonstrated how it was done.
It is really
interesting how something like that can get people’s attention. More interesting still, is how cross
curricular these hands on projects are by their very nature. For example, in explaining how to crack a
whip, no especially easy task if you have never done it before, it gets you to
thinking, “what makes the crack sound, and why?” Now all the sudden we have to get into
science and math concepts because we introduce notions of inertia, acceleration,
speed of sound, breaking the barrier, and we have to deal with the numbers and
speeds which are required to do that.
All the jobs
that I have held beyond minimum wage have required a lot of writing, and all of
it has been technical. It goes without
saying then, that I really appreciated having that technical writing
course. I have felt its value so much
that I would work with my pre-engineering students on their technical writing
skills by assigning technical papers for them to write. This has proved to be extremely valuable to
them in improving their writing ability and is now gaining backing in research,
as experts advocate that we write in our content areas.
When I would
talk to my language arts colleagues and ask if they ever taught technical writing
concepts, the answer was invariably, “no.”
Then I would ask them about it and why they chose not to and the answers
would come back to me that it just wasn’t very important. Too dry, too boring, students would rather
read literature and write creatively.
Even after it was pointed out that most everything that they will read
in their future jobs will be technical, I was told that the purpose of
education is not just to prepare students to work, it is to prepare them for
life. Then I would say, “But they won’t get jobs in creative writing, and
nobody will pay them to sit around reading novels for a living, so how is that
preparing them for life?”
Hopefully,
the notions about technical writing are changing. I recently attended a writing workshop where
the types of writing prompts for a forthcoming standardized test were being
discussed. An English teacher asked why
the students would only be given expository or persuasive prompts to write
about. The presenter stated that unless
students were going to grow up to write the next great American Novel, which
few if any of them will ever do, most all of the writing that they will do in
our lives will be persuasive – convince, or expository – explain, both
technical writing forms; to which I say - Hallelujah Brother!
More Myth-Conceptions
About Teaching
As a National Board Certified Teacher I have the
opportunity to work with other teachers working toward the credential. I always get a kick out of academic teachers
that pull out all these creative hands-on learning activities to feature in
their video presentations for National Board. The lessons have a distinct
vocational education look and feel about them in their applied methodology and
cross curricular emphasis. Teachers do
this in an attempt to demonstrate innovation and a multidisciplinary approach
in their instruction that is not normally present. Sadly, while these lessons really excite the
learning for a time, most of these teachers quickly retreat to the drudgery of
typical academic fare.
Interesting too are the teacher’s attitudes
about student movement and lesson involvement.
I have heard many teachers talk about having to decide which class to
feature in a video presentation, a “good” class or a “bad” class. The problem being that “good” classes just
sits there passively and gives expected scripted answers; while “bad” classes
have energy, more lesson involvement, and a greater sense of unpredictability
with regard to instructional challenges and learning behaviors. When viewing each of these conditions, it is
difficult as a third party evaluator to know if a “good” class was simply
choreographed by the teacher as an artificial classroom performance. With the “bad” class, it is much easier to
judge student learning and the pure teaching and classroom management abilities
of the instructor in the spontaneous, challenging, and active learning
environments which characterize such classes.
It is really humorous to actually hear other teachers suggest to the
candidate that they use the video that features their “bad” class for these
reasons but somehow it never clicks with these same teachers that what they are
really saying is that these elements represent stronger effectiveness
indicators for teaching and learning most of the time.
What is Intelligence?
There are
other ways to view intelligence which may be more appropriate to value in light
of what students need to be doing in the 21st century. I had once heard a definition of intelligence
that when I considered all of its implications, I really started to appreciate
the significance of its meaning:
“Intelligence
is the mind’s ability to react to absent stimuli.”
-
Unknown
If we were
to stop and try to imagine what it is like to think like a great inventor we
would probably come to the realization that they can “see” products before they
are built; processes before they are enacted; reactions before they take
place. They can imagine if they do thing
A, that B will result. They can forecast
the impact of an innovation on society and as a result, they are able to
exploit that knowledge. They can see an
invention coming together in their mind and imagine its workings. Great minds are never bored, because it doesn’t
matter where they are they always have their thoughts with them and because of
that, they can go anywhere, be anyone, or do anything.
To a small
degree, I experienced something of what it is like to have this ability in the
construction of our home. I had designed
the home on paper so I knew the house inside and out. We decided to owner build the home to save
money and because I had some construction experience. As we built the home, I would run into
features of the home construction that I was not sure about because I had never
done it before. So before trying it and
running the risk of error, I would study it out by looking it up in books, or
find people who knew about it and ask them, or even look for finished examples
of the feature in other houses under construction and copy it. Once I got the concept down, I would practice
building the home in my mind and I would keep doing it until it came together
properly. I would not perform the
physical aspects of the home construction until I had successfully built the
project mentally.
This is what
is often termed: “the mind’s eye.”
Steven R. Covey, the author of The Seven
Habits of Highly Successful People, coined the notion of referring to it as
a spiritual creation, because before anything can be created physically, it
must first be created in spirit as an idea.
The better the idea is thought out and created in spirit the better the
physical result. The thing that I found
most interesting about this experience was that it didn’t matter where I was
located physically, the store, the waiting room in the doctor’s office, or just
about anywhere, in my mind I could go to the house and put it together. This became for me a great discovery, because
as I came to realize how powerful the mind can be in this way, I believe it
gave me a glimpse of what really great minds are able to do much of the
time. By reacting to “absent stimuli,”
that is, things not present before you, the mind demonstrates an intellectual
capacity beyond the concrete operations, where anything is possible.
Intellectual Hierarchy
According to
Howard Gardner, another way of looking at intelligence deals with solving
problems, and is presented here in the form of levels of intellectual skill:
Level 1. The
ability to solve problems or resolve difficulties
Level 2. The
ability to create an effective product or means to resolve problems
Level 3. The
ability to create new problems or situations in which new information can be
acquired
Hansen S.E. (2003). “A
New Approach to Learning: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.” Florida Educational Advocate
Some discussion
is warranted here because this intellectual model is not concerned with
accumulated knowledge (what you know), but seeks to show the application of
that knowledge in a useful way. This is
a near total departure from many present measures of intelligence.
Level one is
problem recognition and application of some method to resolve it and make the
problem go away. Take the problem of
having a cluttered and disorganized garage.
In this intellectual level, the solution to the problem might be to consider
straightening up and organizing, or holding a garage sale or throwing things
away to eliminate the clutter.
Level two
requires thought to construct a product or method that will eliminate the
problem. In this case, shelves might be
built; storage strategies and organizational containment systems might be
employed. In level three, the problem
goes even farther as we project that if we have a storage problem that maybe
other people have the same problem. That
generates abundant questions about what sort of common things people have in
the garage and what might be some universal storage strategies and/or products
that can be developed to help. For instance, are there any unconventional
storage systems that have not been created that may be developed and marketed
to the consumer and is there a viable market?
Are there ways of looking at this problem that will fundamentally change
the way we look at storage and the typical use of the garage? You can see how this can blossom into a huge
realm of economic possibilities; this is the characteristic of level three and
why it is so important to develop this ability in the context of building an
educated work force for the future (again, Quadrant D thinking).
“In every business I have ever seen, you start out with a
problem, not enough time, not enough resources, you don’t know what the
competition is doing and you have to invent, design, develop, prototype,
rebuild and the deliver the working solution.”
-
Dean Kamen Inventor of the Segway Scooter
-
How will Intelligence and Educational
Attainment be Valued in the Future?
In
the book entitled: “The Next Fifty
Years,” Roger Schank presents his thoughts about educational futuring in
light of emerging and anticipated informational technologies. Dr. Schank takes his qualifications for
making such predictions as a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and
a distinguished career professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon
University.
The
scope of his predictions are that the wave of information facilitated by
computer processing power and the internet will appear a mere trickle in
contrast with the forthcoming information tsunami expected to hit within the
first half of the new century. These
events will forever change the way intelligence is viewed and measured, and the
types of skills our students will need in the future.
In
bygone eras, the world’s information could be contained in a reasonable sized
volume of encyclopedias. During this
period of time: “… education meant
accumulating information, and intelligence has often meant little more in the
popular imagination that the ability to show off what one has accumulated.”
Presently,
we are witnessing search engines such as Google undertaking to digitize the
entire contents of the Library of Congress.
With the computing power of the home computer projected to eclipse the
thinking prowess of humans within the decade, the day is not far distant when
the “answers will be in the walls.”
Literally, just as in an episode of Star
Trek, we will be able to issue a query into thin air and have our question
answered by the electronics built into our environments.
As
information becomes so easily accessible, it will become devalued; knowledge as
we presently view it, that is, having things committed to memory will be
unnecessary with information on demand.
What will become valued in just such information rich conditions is the
skill of inquiry – the ability to ask good questions.
The
concept of schools as we know them will become a distant memory: “Why go to school to learn facts when virtual
experiences are readily available and the world’s best teachers are at our
disposal at any moment? … world upon world will open up to a child who is
curious.”
In
a world such as this, education will be more about things that have been
experienced in virtual worlds that have been entered and the learning
experiences encountered therein. These
“schools” will be valued not by credential but by the virtual experiences
offered and certifying agencies will be more concerned with what you can do
than with what courses you have taken.
Because of this ease of information access with virtual worlds and
instructors, the smartest people will be no longer be the ones that score
highest on test questions. The best and
brightest of humans will be those that push the limits of the computer’s
ability by posing questions that the computer software can not handle. Such virtual quandaries which stump a
computer would require external human interaction to solve.
In
a present day world which places so much emphasis on testing and knowing
answers to questions, the educational future will value what you can do with
what you know and your ability to ask good questions rather than the ability to
answer them. This evolving highly
technical world will emphasize abilities based and derived from virtual world
training, then knowledge for knowledge sake.
These projections represent the ultimate in learning in the context of
how the knowledge will be applied to accomplish a task.
Summary
All students are of worth, have
unique abilities, and learn differently.
While the academic model of instruction promotes the brightest of
students who learn best in its design, it neglects the larger majority of
students that don’t learn as well in this way.
Applied methods of instruction reach wider populations of students,
provide real world context for skills and as a result, help students make
better cognitive connections.
Traditional measures of intelligence
were based upon the academic model and do not take into account the varying
differences in student ability with regard to multiple intelligences. Nor does it provide for measuring and
promoting intellectual development in areas that current industries demand, or
future industries project, as essential.
Recent technologies which allow
scientists to reveal how information is processed in the brain are lending
great insight into how learning and unlearning occurs. Instruction and methods which do not make use
of this key knowledge about brain research are inadequate and must be
abandoned.
In this chapter an entirely
different way of looking at intelligence has been introduced, based in part on
the research by Harvard
University professor
Howard Gardner. This model identifies
three levels of intellectual hierarchy based upon a student’s problem solving
ability and it underscores the critical importance of this type of development
with regard to the current and future demands of our technological society.
