So I was struck by an interesting analogy today after reading part of a post about flipping curriculum. The problem with current education, the post claims, is that we are focusing on cramming content into courses, rather than working fundamentally on critical thinking skills. I thought, Yes, I totally agree, and then it came into focus, the reason WHY I agree.
Here’s the argument that ran through my head.
First, the amount of information that is available to be learned in our world is increasing at an exponential rate (Actually it might be increasing at an exponential TO an exponential rate, but that’s another story). We are currently attempting to decide on which of this new information is most important to be taught to students, but unfortunately we can only operate at a linear rate, which is really a fancy way of saying that each of us can only do so much work.
The process is, some experienced teachers decide on what needs to be taught during curriculum reviews which take place on the order of a few years, then this information is included in the prescribed learning outcomes for our particular part of the world. Every 5 or 6 years the curriculum gets updated. The problem becomes abundantly clear if you look at the following graph.
The blue line indicates the amount of knowledge we are able to process over the years as educators building curriculum (assuming the number of educators remains roughly constant, which in industrialized countries is approximately true) and the red line indicates the growth of knowledge over time. You may notice a huge problem is looming, very soon we will have no possible way of forcing the content based curriculum we are building match what is actually known as a species.
An analogy to this that occurred to me as a response to a Twitter post by Joe Bower, a great educator living in Alberta. He said, "How do people function properly when they follow hundreds or thousands of people on Twitter? Am I missing something?" I thought of a quick response and decided that there really isn’t a quick response and decided to write this post.
The answer is of course that you can’t possibly follow all of the information, it’s too much, so you have to rely on your ability to analyze information quickly and set limits on how long you are going to try and process information. Anyone who has followed more than a few hundred people has some trick they use to filter through the information. Some people create lists to keep track of specific users, others listen to the Twitter stream for 20 minutes at a time and rely on the fact that really useful and important information will be reTweeted. Essentially all of these people are using some sort of critical analysis of their stream to make the flow of information more manageable.
This is the critical skill we need to teach our students. It will not be possible for an individual stuck in a linear mode to be able to muster the required processing to engage meaningfully with the exponential increase of information available. Therefore in the future, everyone who wants to be successful will need to have the ability to filter information, choose reliable and useful sources of information, and build networks of people to distribute the processing of information over their personal learning network. Each person acts as a node processing part of the information, and collectively we have a chance of being able to select the most valuable information from our incredibly messy information streams.
David Miles says:
Yay! Great to see this point out there. I remember discussions we had at Southbank about students hitting grade 9 and failing mathematics all of a sudden, and this is exactly why that happens.
I’ve decided to have a new go at blogging, take a look at my first post as this is something I talked about there a little – see reference to Rudolf Steiner.
It is going to take some time for those driving our curricula to change their focus, so perhaps we need to work on that from within. Whenever we are developing teaching plans, we need to talk about the critical thinking skills involved. We need to write them into our teaching plans, make them a powerful focus within our classes, and bring them into our discussions with our colleagues. I think if we do this we’ll see our students start to achieve better results, they’ll find they need to spend less time learning new things because they’re developing the skills to handle the information better, and they’ll be more able to synthesize and analyse.
Revolution from the ground up, I think.
February 14, 2010 — 3:54 am
Pamela Hill says:
As a librarian, this is what I’ve been saying for a while now! Great post!
Rather than teaching kids knowledge, they need to be able to critically think about all the knowledge readily available to them everywhere. Sure they do need to learn a base of knowledge in all of the major subjects. But you forget all those details unless you use them regularly. But being able to think critically, to discern which sources are credible and synthesize is CRUCIAL for kids today.
(So if districts could realize this, maybe they’d stop cutting librarians) 🙂
October 5, 2010 — 12:17 pm
Bruce Beairsto says:
I am very interested to know more about “the ability to filter information, choose reliable and useful sources of information, and build networks of people to distribute the processing of information over their personal learning network. Each person acts as a node processing part of the information, and collectively we have a chance of being able to select the most valuable information from our incredibly messy information streams.”
I’m an old timer. I like to feel that I have mastered things and find it difficult to “surf” on the information wave without getting frustrated and worried that I am missing so much. I don’t know if this imitation comes from nature or nurture, but I strongly suspect that at least part of it is due to the attitudes and habits I picked up in school and university – like needing to know everything I had been taught so that I could ace the exam. So, recognizing that one cannot teach students everything they need to know and that much of what we do teach them may be ‘wrong’ in a decade or two, what are the intellectual skills, attitudes and habits that you think we should be inculcating through the way that we teach and how do you think that would make teaching different than it has been? What would education, and schools, look like if students were learning to “distribute the processing of information over their personal learning network.”?
May 17, 2011 — 12:45 pm
David Wees says:
It’s a good question, and in some ways, it is what we are exploring through our new connections on social networks. Each of comes together to discuss ideas, but many of us focus our research and thinking in different areas. We pool our resources through collective conversations, but each of us becomes a connector. If I want to learn more about assessment and grading practices, I follow people like Joe Bower, Frank Noschese, and others. If I want to know more about math education, I follow the people in the #mathchat channel on Twitter. While there is some "group think" that goes on, there is also sharing of ideas and resources not common among educators.
This isn’t actually much different than what happens in schools now anyway. For example, one of the purposes of university is for people to develop a social network to carry them through life. I’m just thinking that this purpose could be realized earlier, perhaps at the high school level, and on a greater scale than has been attempted before.
Other than that, I only have inkling of what this would actually look like, but I’m going to ponder your question and keep thinking about it. It is a great question to bring up.
May 17, 2011 — 1:39 pm