Yong Zhao - 21st Century Learning Skills Workshop

One of the other leading teachers and I went to a workshop in the city yesterday run through the innovations and excellence branch with renowned academic and educator Yong Zhao. I think that the point of the day was for this particular branch to work out what their next project would be and we were there to help them workshop ideas. Yong Zhao had some interesting things to say. I have been to plenty of sessions on 21st century learning in the last 5 or so years but some of the things he was saying were a little more left of centre. He was asking us to think about what knowledge we think is of most worth in this age of technology and information and suggesting that now that we are in a globalised world, and distance no longer defines us, what determines how well an adult will succeed in this global market is what you can give them that makes them worth more than the others who would cost less to pay. Companies will hire people from any where in the world if their labour is cheaper than somewhere else so it is not necessarily about qualifications any more but about what students have to offer.
Zhao believes that what matters in this global economy is
- diversity of talents
- creativity - not skills
- entrepreneurship
- passion
He believes we can encourage this in students through personalised learning - and by that I mean not the watered-down version that we have been attempting to do here for the last 10 years, but actual, personalised learning based on developing the students strengths and helping them reach their own personal life and career goals through resources and learning styles. No standardised, national curriculum with tests to check whether students have met pre-determined benchmark levels.
Interesting stuff that is so far removed from the current moves of education towards standardised, centralised testing and reporting.
This certainly raises questions and also provoked some ideas for me. I have been working these holidays on creating electronic "video" documents that work through the steps of language analysis in a way that covers the sorts of information I would normally chalk and talk. I will be providing students with these sorts of resources, and paper based resources and the learning from these documents can occur whenever and whereever they see fit. This means that during class-times I can run work-shops on the things that the students are struggling with and spent time with individual students working on their own particular concerns.
I am hoping that as the year progresses the english curriculum becomes more and more interactive and student focussed and self-paced like I always hoped it could be.
I will leave this post with a couple of questions posed by Yong Zhao:
What knowledge is of most worth? _Herbert Spencer 1859
Which human jobs should be replaced in schools?
What matters?
What strength does our school have that makes us different or unique?
How to we spread innovation?
What is the cost of high test scores? What do you lose?
How often do we trust out students?