‘Skills of the Future’: Towards Radical Innovation

in School Education

Pavel Lukshapavel.luksha@gmail.com

Presented to the Forum of the Minor Academy of Sciences,

March 2010,Bekasovo, Russia

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Current Trends•Totality of digital reality, blurring online / offline worlds•Automation of routine physical and intellectual labor •Globalization (human capital is the key competitiveness factor)•Transforming roles of corporations, governments and communities•Technologies changing the reality of manufacturing (e.g. 3D printers)•Transformations of social reality (e.g. social innovations, superstructures)

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Just One Trend: the Labor Market

Source: Levy and Murnane (2004: 50)

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Challenges

• Digital and network technologies change methods of finding and acquiring knowledge

• Global issues: environmental crisis, peaking natural resources, global security

• Increasing technological, social, political, geographical uncertainty

• Educational systems are rigid and inadequate to the current global transformation. This problem exists for all countries, and not only for Russia.

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The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed.

William Gibson

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Partnership for 21 Century Skills

• Partners include: US Department of Education, National Education Association, leading ICT companies (Apple, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell and others), leaders of innovative education (EF Education, ETS, McGraw-Hill and others) and media companies (Walt Disney, Sesame Street and others)

• Programs are running in 14 states (25% of US schools)• Initiative involved in the development of legislation,

educational standards and appraisal systems

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21 Century Skills (2): Project Structure

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Edutopia (George Lucas Foundation)

Six ‘core concepts’:• Integrated studies:

different formats of learning and communication • Project-based learning• Technology integration• Social and emotional skills• Comprehensive assessment: not only test results,

but portfolios of projects, social activities etc.• Continuous teacher development and emphasis on

individual contacts with students

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World Wide Workshop

Six ‘skills of the future’:• Network ‘surfing’ and use of network applications• Design and implementation of original digital projects• Project-based learning in wiki-environments• Publication and promotion of student own creative

works through digital media• Learning and knowledge sharing in social networks• Skills of information search and analysis

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School for One (NYC Dept of Education)

• ‘Customized’ learning programs allowing students to choose the best suiting formats depending on their individual learning style and speed (individual ‘day trajectories’ for students)

• Collaborative work of many teachers and students on the development of personal ‘learning trajectories’

• Combination of tutoring, project-based learning and ICT solutions

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Other ‘focused’ initiatives

• Oracle ThinkQuest: solution for project-based learning

• One Laptop per Child Foundation: solution to ‘digital barrier’ through provision of laptops to children in developing countries

• Globaloria: teachning game design and use of new media environment to children through educational projects

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European initiatives to help involve school students into science

• Pilot projects of child-adult research collaboration – education based on collaborative research (Pollen: 12 cities, Sinus-Transfer: 13 cities)

• Initiatives that support ‘best practices’ (Science on Stage, GRID Network and others)

• Emphasis on teaching ‘skills of the future’ in researcher work: skills of exploration, problem solving etc.

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What are all these projects about?

• Nonspecific response to future challenges: – We do not know how exactly the future will look, but

we know about its increasing uncertainty, and therefore we must provide the most universal tools

– Many of these new tools are well-forgotten old: they have existed in the history of education much longer than the main content of ’20th century school’

• ‘Digital world’

• Creation of the ‘desirable future’ through education

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The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn

Alvin Toffler

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‘Skills of the future’ or Meta-subject skills

• Meta-subject skill areas include: learning / re-learning methods, skills for individual and group creativity, communication and self-regulation skills, as well as skills of using new environments and tools

• Meta-subject skills are universal – however, they can be learnt in subject contexts only

• Appropriate learning of meta-subject skills requires:– more than one learning context (ideally, across a great

variety of contexts)– usage in real life (non-school) contexts

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Learning ‘skills of the future’

Meta-subject skills Educational (project) formats

Beneficiaries / stakeholders

- design thinking - team work - effective information processing- time-management - ...

- role playing game - media campaign - research - volunteer practice - ...

- group of students - micro-society (class, school ...) - non-school societies (local community, district, town ...) and different real-life groups (entrepreneurs, disables, ...)- ...

Learning through different formats of educational projects that refer to different ‘project stakeholders’

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How will the School of the Future look?

2. META-SUBJECT

SKILLS

3. CORE AND CROSS-

DISCIPLINIARY KNOWLEDGEABOUT KEY PROBLEMS

4. PROJECTBASED

EDUCATION

5. INTERFACE OF INITIATIVES THAT MERGE SCHOOL LIFE AND REAL LIFE WORLDS

1. BASIC SUBJECTS / ‘LANGUAGES’ (native language, mathematics, foreign languages)

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Creation of learning environments Design of learning environment (any - not capital-

rich and technology-rich only) is one of the purposes of ‘skills of the future’ community

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Learning environmentsbecome a resource of education

Ordrup School in Denmark (Bosch & Fjord project)

We affirm that at the core of all the troubles we face today is our very ignorance of knowing

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela

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Minor Academy of Science (MAN) and other bearers of educational innovation

in Russia

• Despite the loss of momentum, the advanced practices of educational innovators in Russia still retain leading positions in the world.

• MAN system is one of the key repositories of ‘future skills’ in the context of collaborative research PBL

• ... along with other systems of child-adult collaborative project-based learning (e.g. in the context of design: ‘Epistemotics’ by Yu. Gromyko, EDAS by V. Kirpichev, ‘The School of Car Design’ by S. Rykov etc.)

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So, what are our problems?• The Russian society and business do not pose clear

requests to scientific and cultural sectors• In the circumstances of uncertainty, the Russian

government and state education systems towards conservation, not development

• …which means: ‘The government YET is not interested’

• Who are the users of results produced by MAN and other educational innovators?

• How do we solve the problem of talented youth dis-adaptation due to their inability to realize themselves in Russian science and culture?

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Moving towards the ‘Skills of the future’• Teaching ‘skills of the future’ in different learning

contexts (scientific research, engineering design, game design etc.) might become the key future area for MAN

• Empowerment (the perceived power to bring initiative into real life) at the core of ‘skills of the future’ learning

• Extension of ‘skills of the future’ usage contexts to everyday life:– business: e.g. children startups and other practices of

innovative businesses

– social: e.g. volunteer work and other activities for the benefit of society

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Moving towards the ‘Skills of the future’ (2)

• Partnership with innovative business (‘agents of future shaping’ interested in advanced research and culture)

• ‘Going out of the box’:– Teaching ‘skills of the future’ to parents and spreading

through parent education communities

– Involving experts across the variety of professional domains

• International partnerships: significant (but untapped) interest in the EU, the US and emerging markets

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What are we going to do?

• To hold a forum on innovative education models for the 21st century

• To launch the training project to develop teachers’ ‘skills of the future’ that will help them teach these skills to their students

• To create a web-based platform: a wiki on educational technologies related to ‘skills of the future’, and an environment for collaboration

• To initiate projects of international collaboration

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We are at the threshold of tremendous changes that will give us amazing

opportunities...