A personal observation: Back when I began my early education, the year was 1952. I don’t believe Pre-K even existed back then, so I started my education in Kindergarten. There is no doubt in my mind that in my early education I was exposed to educators who were students of a 19th Century education. Those teachers were teaching content to kids using methods they had learned in the 1800’s. Content back then was more solid and more trustworthy. Things did not change. Encyclopedias, the source of information back then, were very dependable. Encyclopedias were infrequently updated by today’s standards. I think the update cycle was about every six years. Yearbook editions filled in the gaps each year and they usually came out the year after the date of the title. It took at least a year to print, so content was dated on the first day any encyclopedia was opened, so relevance was never an issue. Even the news cycle was slow-paced. Newspapers and magazines had to wait at least 24 hours before they could address any change or present anything new.
The pace for 19th Century educators preparing kids for the 20th Century was much slower. It was easy to address change because teachers had time to absorb change and mull it over before they had to present it. Change had the luxury of being able to be pondered before acceptance. There was no rush. . As long as things in the system worked, we continued to do the same things over and over.
The concept of changing things came when the Russians put up Sputnik. For those who were not around then,that was the first satellite in space. That was when Americans began to ask, “How did this happen?” That was when Americans needed to play catch-up to be relevant. Before Sputnik, we were content with teaching from behind. We were fine with our education system. The system served us well until there was a competition. That is when that American competitive spirit kicked into gear and we were in the “Space Race” with the Russians.
It was time to move out the 19th Century ways, and race to the 20th Century, even though we were over 50 years into it. We ramped things up, and even relevance was not enough; we needed to go beyond relevance to innovation. A mere satellite was not enough, we needed a solid win with a moon landing. The benefits were enormous with Velcro, Tang, and Dried Ice Cream, as well as the NASA space program. Education was now in the 20th Century and we were never going back.
Once the Space Race was over, and we declared ourselves the winners, things began to slow down again. Educators settled in. Innovation was replaced by relevance, but that soon was overtaken by complacency. As long as things in the system worked, we continued to do the same things over and over. Technology, however, had again reared its ugly head. It comes not in the form of a basketball-shaped object hurtling through space, but in the form of digital information and content that dwarfs the total collection of ALL previously printed tomes of knowledge combined. As they were in the late 50’s, educators, the complacent content providers, are again caught with their pants down.
Again, we needed to call upon the competitive spirit of Americans in order to shake off the shackles of complacency. We needed another Space Race. We need some real competition to get educators beyond relevance and into innovation once again. If there is no real competition, we can make one up. We can use education itself as the motivator. We can put educators competing with other educators from around the world to see who will be at the top. That will drive the call to shake off the ways of the 20th Century and teach for the 21st Century even though we are more than a decade into it.
This “Race to the Top” and teaching for the 21st Century are only slogans. They are designed to be reminiscent of “The Race for Space” and “Teaching for the 20th Century”. That harkens to a time when educators were able to change things up, but it was a different era. We don’t compare modes of transportation from the 20th century to those capabilities of transportation today. A DC 6 airplane cannot be compared to a 747 Jetliner. Why would we expect motivations of the 50’s and 60’s to work today? Slogans and contrived competitions are poor substitutes for relevant professional development.
We can’t expect to teach kids for the 21st century today, because we are over a decade too late. We can’t expect to teach kids for the 21st century with educators in an education system steeped in methods of the 20th Century. We can’t expect to teach kids for the 21st Century with a majority of an educational infrastructure built between 1850 and 1950.
We can expect positive change, if we address these very real issues. We don’t need to teach for the future, we need to concentrate on today, and that requires relevance. Relevance requires continuous development for everyone. Before we can expect innovation, we all have to be on board with relevance. That will require a commitment to professional development. We can’t expect students to be relevant when their teachers are not. We can’t expect skills to be relevant, if the tools for those skills are not. Our culture strives for relevance at every turn except in education. Businesses pay top dollar to be and stay relevant. Relevance is the key to what we have called a modern society.
There is no way for educators who are among the most educated people in our society to stay relevant without continuously learning. It cannot be expected to happen on its own. Learning is not a passive endeavor. Teachers must be professionally developed continually over the course of their careers. It must be part of their work week. It requires a commitment on the part of the schools to provide it, and the teachers to do it. People need to be not only professionally developed, but supported in their efforts to be relevant, in order to move on to innovation. Let’s not teach for a century, but rather teach for now, and the ability to continually learn and adapt. We need our people, adults and children to be able to deal with any century moving forward.
dried ice cream?
The more relevant term is astronaut’s Ice cream. They sell it at the NASA Space Museum in DC
I used to love that stuff. I would beg my parents for it every time we went to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum growing up.
Ahhh…. sweet nostalgia.
My only question is whether competition is necessarily the best way to foster this type of innovation. Given your involvement in #edchat as a collaborative effort to improve education in the classroom, I wonder if competition fosters ill side effects, mostly that educators won’t share their techniques with others if they stand to benefit more from holding onto them. Competition serves as an extrinsic motivator for those who may not be motivated otherwise, but I would have to think a collaborative spirit would be more effective overall.
The rest of your piece is extremely poignant – the accelerating rate of change in the modern world is something that is difficult to keep up with, and its even more difficult if you’re not used that pace of learning. A professional development course on speedy professional development might be in order..
Also, freeze-dried ice cream is the best 🙂
I have to agree with @timetoknow. Space race and all, I see competition as a 20th century thing. Tom, I think your post is a nice compliment to one I wrote last week about the definition of technology [http://carlanderson.blogspot.com/2012/01/invisible-technology-of-school.html]. Curious what your thoughts are.
All good points Tom, but I wonder if there needs to be a ‘Sputnik moment’ yet. At the moment, whilst there’s lots of agreement that things need to change, there’s no absolutely compelling moment that’s creating the momentum with everybody inside and outside of the system all pointing in the same direction and driving for a fix.
What the Sputnik moment did was to get everybody’s attention, on the same thing, at the same time – and agreed on a need for action.
I wonder if the PISA testing might be that moment – as countries such as the US and Australia gracefully slide down the rankings in comparison to other countires, will there be a moment when people together look at it and say ‘Hold on, how did we let our education system get here?’
Without the common shared realisation, will there be a way of getting everybody aligned.
(And if it isn’t international comparisons, what will it be?)
There also has to be an attitudinal shift. Systems need to embrace teachers as learners, rather than silence them. New ideas have to be shared and debated, not hidden from view. Processes and structures that foster relevancy, response and brain-friendly education need to be created and continually revised. Who will lead the charge in school systems across the country?
Great post Tom. Passed this one on to the entire staff.
Excellent article. Let’s talk handwriting – why is everyone obsessed with handwriting when it’s one skill that most adults no longer use/need? Surely being creative is more valuable than handwriting? Will my 9 year old be doing written exams in 9 years time? Is spelling is similar.
Fantastic post, agree with you 70% !
Now are you feeling competitive about how to get that extra 30% agreement? 😉
I agree with TimeToKnow, Carl Anderson, and Ray Fleming that the concept of “competitiveness” and the drive to “win” or “be number one” is a bit last century.
Technological shifts such as the internet, social media, massive multi-player games, crowd sourcing sites, etc have brought with them a social preference towards a sharing, collaborative, supportive approach – which favours working together for shared gains. And on the web geographical boundaries don’t exist in the same way that invokes that type of ‘my country is better than yours’ patriotism. (Though on that last point, I am speaking from Australia and it may be different here to where you live).
In a sector like education, if anything more collaboration and sharing of knowledge is needed so that teachers can work out best practices rather than working in isolation.
On the topic of “relevance” vs “innovation”, you haven’t quite defined here what it is that you think is “relevant” vs irrelevant, and in many situations innovation comes when a problem is identified in the old way of doing things, and innovation arrives in the form of a new solution. Innovation is about finding better ways of doing something – not simply changing for the sake of changing.
I agree with continuous development! However what is the content of the development? To be relevant – in a world full of so much change – often involves innovation, especially when we know the current education system (which hasn’t really changed that much in hundreds of years) is not cutting the mustard.
It’s true that not every teacher needs to be an innovator (in the technology uptake cycle about 14% are considered innovators, followed by early adopters, laggards, and then luddites), however they system itself needs a good dose of it, drawing on global research to create a better system.
>> Disclaimer: PLANE is an Australian Professional Development World for educators, we’re developing bunch of features backed by good research that I would consider both innovative and relevant. At the moment the only thing to view publicly is our blog, however we’ll be launching mid 2012.
Thanks for the good read 🙂
Enjoyed reading your post. Tang–what a great drink until I discovered what Florida and Californian orange juice really tasted like. Velcro was discovered years before NASA began by George de Mestral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro
I used to try and inspire my grade 5 students by reading out loud to them the inventions that we take for grante. Who knows, maybe I planted the seed for a budding inventor. That’s one way we make our profession relevant. And by the practice of kaizen–continual improvement in this fast pace society we now live in.
Love the parallels between education reform movements in the three centuries, Tom! But I think you glossed over the Progressive moment in 20th century education, in part because IT was glossed over by the profession, more or less. I feel that’s important because I think something similar is happening with RT3. Technologies are unleashing some very progressive, and in my opinion, very liberating possibilities for teachers and students to improve their game, or even change the game, but we’re being “governed” by a system of measurements that refuse to acknowledge those changes. Sam Wineburg’s version of what happened to Progressivism is eerily similar (“Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts”).
You point out that we can’t keep up with these changes as educators, but a Progressive response would be that we shouldn’t try. As I’m fond of saying, we’ll live in our students’ world before they live in ours, because while our world ebbs away, day by day, young people are busy helping that to happen by transforming it to meet their needs. With that thought in mind, rather than focusing on OUR professional development, shouldn’t we be focusing on theirs?
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I have been gone for some time, but now I remember why I used to love this blog. Thanks, I will try and check back more frequently. How often do you update your website?