Particular patterns of pedagogy have been of most interest to me across the years, particularly those that shift the focus from what the teacher does to what the student does. With this shift comes an emphasis on understanding how students learn and with this knowledge in mind developing learning experiences that will allow them to develop their skills for learning.
This pattern comes out of the emergence of a number of elements impacting education. One is the rise of ICT and the shift that this brings to the importance of content knowledge. When the teaching of content knowledge was an important role for teachers the emphasis was on the transfer of this from the teacher to the student. Teaching was about how effectively this transfer could take place and how this transfer may be measured. The student’s role in this process was relatively passive and receptive.
Now that access to content is ubiquitous the value of pools of knowledge stored in long term memory has declined. But the challenge of ubiquitous knowledge is compounded by trends towards the deliberate perversion and falsification of knowledge. "The notion of science as a conspiracy rather than a world-changing field of inquiry used to be confined to cranks. No longer. It seems to me intolerable that this should be so.” (Matthew d’Ancona) Our students require the cognitive tools which allow them to seek the truth and falsehood in the information they confront and while a base load of knowledge may assist with this, skills and dispositions for truth seeking are vital and must be nourished.
Overall the emphasis is on what students are able to do with the knowledge they possess and we must provide opportunities for this to occur. (Wagner & Dintmarsh 2015) Further we must consider that the opportunities that students have to have to be publishers of knowledge, ideas and products has risen alongside other technological changes. Our students can readily become creators of content and will enter a workplace where this is an expected skill.
For pedagogy the consequence of this is that we shift towards a student centred learning model in which the students are empowered to be learners. Seeing students as creators of works, finders of problems, metacognitive learners and global connected collaborators brings a shift in the role of the teacher to one of guide and mentor. (Lough ran 2013) Much is made of measuring who does most of the talking in classrooms and the shift is towards a classroom dominated by the students' voices. (November. 2012). We can set up scenarios in our classes that allow students to fail and in doing so explore iterative learning cycles of trial and error through which students learn ‘grit’ and expand their ability to grapple with complex ideas and solve ‘wicked problems’. The assessment in these classrooms is more interested in evaluating the processes of problem or inquiry based learning utilised by the students rather than the recall of content. Students learn to identify a meaningful problem, structure it in a way that facilitates inquiry, gather and evaluate information and share the results with an interested audience.
The difficulty that all of this shift in pedagogy is that neither the curriculum or the ‘High Stakes Testing’ of NAPLAN and HSC have kept pace with the change. While teachers struggle to adapt their pedagogy to better fit this new model they do so with a narrow, content heavy curriculum and in a climate of testing that focuses on base skills in limited curriculum areas. That compliance with the curriculum, curriculum knowledge and performance on standardised tests are measures of school and teacher success makes the task of delivering a student centred pedagogy more difficult. For the students they are confronted by a conflict in the three message systems that play a most significant role in prioritising education; curriculum (the what might be taught), pedagogy (how teaching and learning is delivered) and assessment (what is valued by its measurement).
The result is we have students who are engaged by learning that focuses on their long-life skill development and challenges them with meaningful learning experiences linked to their interests and real world problems and yet they are measured against a curriculum that overemphasises specific content knowledge and tested in ways that do not allow them to use their skills for creativity, collaboration and connectedness. The result is a grammar of schooling which while excellent preparation for a narrow assessment regime is less than ideal preparation for life.
By Nigel Coutts
d’Ancona, M. (2017) "Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back”. London, Elbury Press.
Loughran, J. (2013). Pedagogy: Making Sense of the Complex Relationship between Teaching and Learning. Curriculum Inquiry. 43, 1, 118-141.
November, A. (2012) Who owns the learning?: Preparing students for success in the digital age. Solution Tree Press; Bloomington IN
Wagner, T.& Dintmarsh, T. (2015) Most likely to succeed: Preparing our kids for the innovation era. Simon & Schuster; New York