The November edition of School Leadership Briefing includes a good interview with Lee Crocket, co-author of Literacy is not enough: 21st Century fluencies for the digital age. Here are two excerpts.
The skill that we teach in school is really what we call educational bulimia. We teach them memorization and regurgitation of information. In a 24/7 Wikipedia world, the skill of being able to remember a significant amount of information is not really a skill that is in demand. Being able to repeat that information is not necessarily something that is needed. The skills, like I said and we have talked about before, about being able to deal with different types of media, being able to communicate and collaborate with people that are not only in the room but on the other side of the planet, the ability to solve problems constantly in real time, those are skills that are needed and that is the difference between school smart and street smart
Have teachers inadvertantly become a bottleneck to learning?
” … the instructional approach in school builds what we call a culture of dependency … dependency on the teacher, dependency on the text book … where the job of students is to sit and be told exactly what to do, how to do it, and then to be tested on regurgitating that same piece of information.”
Do we need to move from a “just in case” to more of a “just in time” learning approach?
Kids in particular, they do not use Google the same way that you and I would use Google to search for something. The first place they go is to YouTube, because when they want to learn something, they want to learn it just in time. The philosophy of ‘just in time learning’ to them means they want to know how to fix a mountain bike until it is time to fix a mountain bike. They don’t want to learn how to fix a mountain bike six months before that, they want to learn it when they need that skill.
School provides a very structured environment where we do just in case learning … It is a complete disconnect between their style of learning and our traditional style of teaching. They have learned to be able to access information and to learn in real time. School provides a very structured environment where we do ‘just in case learning,’ where the reason that we tell students they need this piece of information is just in case it is going to be on this exam, just in case you might want to become an engineer or a doctor, or something like that, just in case you want to go to a university, and that is not really something that make sense to them. It is a complete disconnect between their style of learning and our traditional style of teaching.
