We have a new world that is exponentially revealing itself. Continually throwing out disruptions, challenging long held beliefs and assumptions, causing an ever-increasing number of people to question the way to go about adding unique value in their society.

This world is dynamic, bewildering, amazing, scary, awe-inspiring. It’s a great many things, but it’s not unchanging.

Learning how to learn, how to think strategically about what excites me and how I can leverage value to my world through my interests defines my adaptability in this environment of chaotic change and unprecedented opportunity.

Education in the United States, I feel it can easily be said, has yet to “find itself” in this new context. The world has and is changing in ways that our systems of education were never designed to handle. We know we need to do a better job, we need to provide a future-proof learning experience for our kids.

But what does that better thing look like? How exactly do we do this? We’re strangers in a new world all of a sudden, and we don’t know exactly how to deal.

There are accounts of explorers burning their ships when they hit the new world, a reinforcement to the idea that “there’s no going back”.

Perhaps we have something to learn from their approach.

We know we need to have students persistently problem solve, collaborate, communicate effectively, develop a passion to learn, creatively express themselves in meaningful ways; the list goes on.

We know enough about the challenges of the future to know that our kids will definitely need these kinds of skills, but we’re not doing that in any kind of focused way.

We cover content. We test. We require the regurgitation of facts. We tweak policies. We hold our systems accountable according to metrics that don’t even glimpse at any of the critical skills and dispositions mentioned.

We have old ships that have crashed onto the rocky coast of change and chaos. Burn them, indeed there’s no going back.

We need to create incubating learning environments that foster Google-age skills and journeys of personal learning.

We need to teach kids how to learn, while maintaining their natural curiosity.

We need to connect our kids to the world of opportunity available to them, and show them how to do this in safe and ethical ways.

We need to create environments where students develop their individual creativity and express their capacity to create through meaningful contributions to their world.

Do we know how to measure this? Do we know how to create systems of accountability around these ideals? Do we know exactly how to pull this off? Nope.

That doesn’t change the fact that this is what we need to be busy doing. Our ignorance and inexperience in this new world doesn’t change the fact that we want our youth to thrive in strangely uncertain times.

Let’s develop some laser focus on figuring out the difficult things, the things that provide reasonable hope in equipping our kids for their vastly different future. This is the work that matters most now, so let’s burn the ships and get to exploring. 

So I took OAP sample assessment for Ohio 8th grade Social Studies (ohsspilot.portal.airast.org).

Of the 26 questions, I easily found the answer to 25 of them via google. I’ve referenced the list of links that my Google searching produced here:

http://www.diigo.com/user/andrewsams/ohpt

I fully admit a few things concerning this experience. I have forgotten the large majority of facts that would have enabled me to do well on this test, had I not had access to Google. That being said, the facts I needed to find for this test in no way whatsoever empower me to add unique value in these times of exponential change. 

The only time that I would really need to recall the things that I was being asked on this test, would be during a test. I call into question the usefulness of such a test in the digital age.

Is it essential to remember date and time associated facts, or is it more important for our students to:

• Communicate complicated ideas effectively
• Develop passionate creativity related to their interests
• Collaborate
• Develop an understanding of interconnected concepts through unfiltered sources of information
• Tell elaborate stories with mathematical constructs

The list grows as our society evolves in its capacity to make connections, to create new information in new ways, at a pace our species has seen before.

I made a big damn deal about it, I really did.  ”There is a huge chasm between being a student and being a learner, and the world needs learners!”

I spent some time with a cadre of students who are participating in this credit-flex approach to Advanced Computer Science.  We’ve been at it for 9 weeks now, and the conversations and perspectives have become hugely informative for me, as the learners become my teacher.

“This has been really tough, but it’s also something that I have come to love about what we’re doing”, one student explains.  

“To know that we are on our own has an element of freedom, but also an element that scares us.  If you get lost, there’s no point to raising your hand.  If I get behind, there’s no one there to push me or keep me on task.”

Another perspective related by a participant regarding digital-age skills, “there is so much of this happening online, and there are so many distractions online, that I have a hard time staying focused and I’ve had to practice staying at it.”

The examples from above are from participants that are in their senior year of high school.  They have now been given the chance to glimpse at what learning can look like when it is conceived as something the we do for ourselves, rather than something done to us.

Each student from the group I was speaking with, after one student articulated the above thought, had their own way of expressing it.  The learning is for them, and they are in control of it.  For some, for the first time ever.  No formal curriculum, no pacing guide.  Passion, resources, and the skills for making learning connections in the digital age.

Their transition, each making it successfully to their own degree, involving this new form of learning has the common theme of taking back control, and managing self.

This is where my reflective path began, almost immediately after leaving the conversation.

Where do students begin to feel that learning is something done for and to them, coming from sources external, and not something created internal?  These students felt learning was the thing that happened at school, with teachers, and busses, and books; almost exclusively.  Where did that sense, that conceptualization of learning begin?

Did it begin with the standards?  Did it begin by education making the judgement that by virtue of age and thus grade that you must become a “good reader”, for example.  And why do you need to be a “good reader”?  Because someone external is telling you so.

And how do I become a “good reader”?  By meeting the benchmarks that are defined by someone, something external to you.

And if I don’t become a “good reader”, if this just isn’t my time right now to live up to these external expectations, then what?  We will remediate you, a whole pyramid will determine what’s best for you, and what skills we will practice, drill, and assess.

It seems that because we don’t know, for the case of each child, where they will ultimately go and what they will ultimately do to add unique value to society, that we cast a mold of learning that we feel all children need.

We judge our ancestors harshly, for the ignorant things they did.  Yet at the time, it was the only way they knew, and if we had asked one of them, back in the day, while they were doing the ignorant thing; “surely this is the best way of doing it”, they might say.  For what other way would there be to do it?