Our Bridge to the Future

Probably one of the most common complaints about History is that it’s “boring.” Students are not engaged by the reading and regurgitating that they have had to endure over the years, and it will only get worse. As technology continues to advance, students will be increasingly conditioned to seek visual and interactive sources. If we are to going reach our students, we need to be prepared to meet them in their advancing world. One of the best ways we are currently able to do that is by creating webquests. Webquests allow teachers to organize information in such a way that is accessible and stimulating for students of the Internet Age. Students are shown how to learn by means that are most familiar to them, and that the content, in this case History, is relevant even in this technological age. Students are also taught to use these great resources to communicate real information, beyond social news on Facebook or Twitter.

Our vision for the class says that,

“Today’s students are tomorrow’s citizens creating and shaping the world we live in.  Schools will create opportunities for authentic learning experiences that will prepare them for this role.  Students in 2025 must be critical thinkers capable of understanding, embracing and positively impacting society.  Since learning never truly stops, we, as educators, must instill in students lifelong critical thinking and interpersonal skills for success in an increasingly global and technological society.  We aim to foster independent thinkers who are ambitious and innovative.  Students will be exposed to an interdisciplinary curriculum with an emphasis on connecting our core values.  Students will practice logic and perseverance to become self-reliant, resourceful, ethical, and responsible global citizens.”

By using webquests, we are equipping “tomorrow’s citizens” with the tools they need to “create and shape the world,” tools that will keep them up to speed in a world that is moving increasingly online and advancing much faster than it ever has before. Rather than sacrifice content for technology, webquests allow the two to feed the development of each other, teaching critical thinking and creativity in the context of traditional subjects, such as History. Hopefully, students will take what they learn about using technological resources in the classroom, and apply it to their adult lives. If they can do this in the context of the values we hope to instill, that is, responsibility, ethics, perseverance, logical thinking, and resourcefulness, the will be able to truly reshape the world around them. While we hope to use technology to teach the pursuit of social justice, it is also something that flows naturally from understanding these values in the context of our class vision.

The National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies state that, “Social studies programs should include experiences that provide for the study of relationships among science, technology, and society,” and “Social studies programs should include experiences that provide for the study of global connections and interdependence.” The webquest that I created this semester incorporates both of these standard principles. Students are asked to evaluate the effects of changing scientific and technological atmospheres on the ideas of American citizenship throughout history. Using this information, they then look forward to the next 15 years to see how the constant scientific and technological progress will affect ideas of citizenship in the future. This also allows them to understand the more universal idea of the effects of science and technology on society as a whole.

Overall, webquests will be a vital component of classrooms for at least the next few years. It is impossible to know what advances will happen between now and 2025, but by equipping students with the tools and understandings to keep up with technology, we will be ready regardless of where it takes us.

Public Secondary Schools Redefined for 2025

A vision for the future of Public Secondary Schooling is not just a shift in emphasis or a couple new laptops. The future is happening now, and it is far different from anything schools have encountered before. Public Secondary Schools should be restructured for the future, for the developing present, by a complete overhaul of education, as we understand it. Students today have no problem accessing information or using technology. They can probably be more detailed in teaching us about the founding fathers using a fifteen-minute Google search, than we can in an hour of lecture. What our students need from us is the ability to think, to go outside of themselves, to recognize their place in the world around them and seize the opportunity to participate. Our current education structure does not teach these things.

Students have information, that much is clear. Without guidance, however, they will usually do essentially nothing with that knowledge. They know how to find out how to do things or teach themselves concepts, but without the motivation, without understanding why they should do it all, they’re more likely to continue playing X-Box or talking about their social lives. “The ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole is vital today. The amount of accumulated knowledge is reportedly doubling every two or three years (wisdom presumably accrues more slowly!). Sources of information are vase and disparate, and individuals crave coherence and integration” (Gardner, p. 46). Schools need to be set up to draw students out of their comfort zones, and challenge them to use the wealth of information at their finger tips to think critically.

However, thinking critically on their own is only going to get them so far. This “new education” needs to point students toward collaboration. “A most important insight, due to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the realization that creativity is never simply the achievement of a lone individual or even a small group. Rather, creativity is the occasional emergent from the interaction of three autonomous elements: [the individual, the cultural domain in which the individual is working, and the social field – those individuals and institutions that provide access to relevant educational experiences as well as opportunities to perform]” (Gardner, pp. 80-81). If they can learn to bring together their ideas, they will be able to do with the resources of the future what has driven humanity up until the last century (Gardner, p. 79-80), build off of each other toward a progress that benefits more than just a small group of self-concerned individuals.

            Sythesizing and creating are all well and good on their own, but it is the self-centered mindset of our society that is most in need of address. For that reason, the new education, more than anything else, needs to teach our students to work for the good of others; that is, to be “ethically minded.” Gardner puts it quite well, saying, “Educators can smooth the road to an ethical mind by drawing attention to the other connotations of goodness. Students need to understand why they are learning what they are learning and how this knowledge can be put to constructive uses. As disciplined learners, it is our job to understand the world. But if we are to be ethical human beings, it is equally our job to use that understanding to improve the quality of life and living and to bear witness when that understanding (or misunderstanding) is being used in destructive ways. This is a reason why community service and other forms of giving are – or should be – an important part of the curriculum of any school” (Gardner, p. 142). It is a lengthy explanation, but a necessarily comprehensive one; Gardner’s point is solid. Students need to understand that what they learn is always for larger application. Not only htat, but for the larger application to a “good” beyond themselves. Our students are smart, but their intelligence and natural talent needs to be channeled toward the good of society, so as to ensure the positive progress, rather than a selfish self-destruction.

Role of Schooling in 2025 and Authentic Learning Experiences

The fact is, teachers’ roles are on the brink of upheaval. With the Internet becoming increasingly accessible through more and more avenues every day, students need less and less to be taught facts. They do not need to wake up at six in the morning every day to be taught things they can look up on their smart phones. I do not mean to say that teachers are being made obsolete. What I mean is that the idea of a teacher as a source of information is quickly becoming outdated. Instead, teachers are becoming “learning guides.” In fact, I am pretty sure that schooling in 2025 will be more of a guiding force than an instructional one. While schools will not need to teach students concrete information, they will need to teach students to think critically - particularly how to be able to discern between solid and questionable information, how think and act ethically (particularly with information), and how to be disciplined in their work. Schools will become less of an assembly line, churning out state-approved students one by one, and more of an outfitting store, setting them up with the equipment they need for whatever life path they have ahead of them.

I think this will lead to a lot more independent studies and individualized learning. Students will not need to be in classrooms that have them all working on the same project. Instead, they can be in classrooms where their learning guide (teacher) is there to help them learn the critical thinking skills they need to go out into the world. These skills include understanding how to determine not only the credibility of a source, but also the bias each source presents, and how these factors affect the information given. Students will need to learn to synthesize information and formulate their own ideas and opinions on it, in an easily communicable way. This may include some writing lessons, however writing technique will likely be taking a back seat to communicability – that is, how well can people understand what they are trying to say?

With these predictions in mind, teachers of today need to be thinking ahead as to how they can prepare their students for this rapidly approaching future. Not all students are ready to be sent out on their own just yet. We have done such a good job, as a culture, of coddling them throughout childhood that abruptly turning them loose would be disastrous. What we can do, however, is begin to fade toward these more independent classrooms. Allowing students to spend more time in individualized study, especially online, will prepare them to eventually take the reigns in their learning. Students that may need more guidance will still have full access to the teacher, and will benefit from maintaining much of the instructional time. Over the course of their academic careers, however, they should become comfortable with the idea of being released onto the Internet with an individual goal or project in mind.

One thing that is particularly important during this period of change in education is the abandonment of tracking. By reuniting students into one classroom, all students can be pushed to succeed. While this is a dauntingly difficult situation for a teacher today, the increased use of the Internet for learning will allow students to essentially differentiate themselves. Depending on their own needs, students can find their information through visuals, text, or a combination of the two, all of which are available in a variety of levels of complexity.

History of the Future - Synthesis 1

The role of content knowledge in the classroom, especially in the social studies, has been changing for many years now. As technology continues to develop, we are shown more and more definitively that the “who, what, where, and when” are far less important than the “why and how.” In my own teaching philosophy, even in 2011, I do not plan to put much of any emphasis on the names and dates side of history. Rather, I want to delve into why and how events in history happened, and what that means for the present day. Unfortunately, the Virginia Standards of Learning have not quite caught up to my futuristic way of thinking, so I will need to slip in the names and dates somewhere along the way. Hopefully, however, by 2025 the Standards of Learning will have been brought up to speed and no longer require basic factual knowledge. Instead they can focus on evaluating an understanding of trends and historical ideas.

The year 2025 is not as far in the future as it sounds. In the last fourteen years, a lot of advances have been made in technology, but life, as we live it day to day, is relatively the same. There is a phenomenon unfolding among the people of my own generation, Generation Y, and it is inevitable in the generations to come. We are not impressed by new developments in technology. Technology changes and advances so much, so often, that it has become a normal part of life. There is a general sense of, “if it can be done, they’ll do it.” The idea of learning how to use the latest gadget is half the fun of buying it.

All of this is to say that the students of 2025 will not need to learn any skills technologically. They will be even more adaptive to new technology than my generation is, and it will likely faze them even less than it does ours. What they will need from teachers, however, are the skills endangered by this growing wealth of information. They need to learn to think critically for themselves. There will be so much information available from so many reputable sources, that the temptation is going to be very great for students to just use someone else’s thought process. We as educators need to teach them how to draw their own conclusions and how to approach a situation with historical trends in mind. If we do not, we are robbing our students, and future generations, of the opportunity for creative thought, and setting them up to believe whatever they’re fed through Google.

Welcome to a wicked sweet blog - looking to the future of our nation's education.