What is the future of learning?

What should our pupils be learning to prepare them for the future? In this article Steven Mark, Director of the International Primary Curriculum, shares some of the messages from the first ever Future of Learning Conference 2009. Find out more about the Five Minds for the Future and what it means for education…

Steven Mark is the Director of the International Primary Curriculum. He recently attended the first ever Future of Learning Conference 2009 at Harvard Graduate School of Education; home of Project Zero. Project Zero - an educational research institute at Harvard - is leading world thinking on turning the very latest research and understanding of learning into practical applications for teachers and schools. Here Steven talks about some of the thinking coming out of this first conference.

Howard Gardner, David Perkins, Fernando Reimer, Kurt Fischer and David Rose. These were just some of the respected names sharing their latest thinking at the Future of Learning Conference in August. Focusing on the nature of learning and education, the conference centred on three main areas that are shaping and changing the world today: globalisation, neuroscience and digital learning.

Five Minds for the Future

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He proposed his five minds for the future as a means of enabling children to prepare for the fast changing world that they will be living and working in. Howard believes that throughout their learning, children should be developing five distinct minds:

The Disciplined Mind that enables a learner to gain knowledge and expertise.
The Synthesising Mind which ensures that a learner evaluates and then organises the mass of information available today and decides what of that information is necessary and beneficial.
The Creating Mind which encourages a learner to think outside the box; bearing in mind that to think outside of the box, you have to have a ‘box’ in the first place. In debating this point, Howard refers back to the need to develop the Disciplined Mind in order to provide the framework to optimise a Creating Mind.

These first three minds of Howard’s suggest a depth to learning (discipline), a breadth to learning (synthesising) and a stretching of learning (creating) that help to form the academic learners that he believes we should be developing. In addition, Howard suggests two additional minds for the future; the Respectful Mind and the Ethical Mind to ensure that children are able to live and engage in an interconnected world responsibly and morally as both a citizen and as a worker/contributor.

Listening to Howard, I was constantly reminded of the need for rigour throughout learning in order to provide the framework from which the developing mind can flourish.

What This Means for Education

David Perkins is the Senior Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. David took the latest research into globalisation, neuroscience and digital learning and looked at what that means for education, asking the question: when we don’t know what the world will look like that our children will be adults in, how can we, as educationalists, ensure them of a good life in a complex and changing world?

David suggested that our search for ultimate answers is now less important than knowing how to get around a problem. He argued that, as teachers, our role should not be about imparting knowledge, but rather teaching children to use knowledge in a skilful way; in other words, to become a good investigator.

He discussed what he calls the Relevance Gap; asking the crucial question, what really is worth teaching? We considered quadratic equations as an example, asking how many of us use them in adult life and putting that into the context of value for learning. There are of course many uses for quadratic equations but for many of us this was never explained at school. For those skills and knowledge that do have value, David urged teachers to make their learning relevant to children. Understanding why they are learning something and its purpose within real-life situations will, he argues, inspire children to want to learn.

David proposed that we should take a hard look at the curriculum, reframing (with context), replacing (throwing out the outdated stuff) and reinforcing (giving prominence to those skills used extensively in today’s society) and this will result in the ‘Come-Upance Curriculum’ – a curriculum filled with learning of relevance for life today and tomorrow.

Globalisation and Transformational Learning

A major thrust of the conference was globalisation and our responsibility to help children learn to become citizens of the world. Learning through globalisation - considered to play a large part in transformational learning (the imparting of knowledge and understanding to shape opinions and perspectives) - was proposed through four threads:

Integration of economies – the impact of extended trade and travel
Integration of knowledge – the power of shared, particularly web-based knowledge
Integration of culture – debating such issues as the Westernising of many countries and cultures
Movement of people – the effects caused by the largest movement of people ever in the history of civilisation. Worth learning? Absolutely when you learn that the huge migration of people from Africa is actually having the biggest impact on the alleviation of poverty. According to figures quoted at the conference, a staggering $350 billion is being sent back home to families by Africans who have emigrated. And think about this one: over a quarter of the GDP of twelve African countries comes entirely from people having left that country to live and work overseas and who are then sending money home.

Howard Gardner urged learning from the point of view of an interconnected world and our obligation as educators to develop cosmopolitanism, recommending the creation of a new ‘global studies’ subject within the curriculum.

Fernando Reimers, Director of International Education Policy and Global Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education concluded with an argument for transformational learning; that perhaps we cannot change the world and we cannot change society as it is, but we can change learning in the classroom.

Is that the future of learning?

Howard Gardner will be speaking in the UK in October at the Learning and Leadership Conference 2009 hosted by the International Primary Curriculum. The conference, How Can We Best Help Children and Students Learn? is open to all school leaders and will take place at St. Matthew Academy in Lewisham, London on October 8^th and 9^th. Dr. Gardner will lead the entire first day of the conference which will include three of his key ideas: five minds for the future, leadership and multiple intelligences. For more details go to www. internationalprimarycurriculum.com or contact Laura Phillips at Fieldwork Education at 0207-531-9696.

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