The Changing Nature of Teaching and Learning in the Junior Classroom

I’m taking an Additional Basic Qualification Course through Brock University to become qualified to teach the Junior Division (Grades 4-6), and one of the readings for this course is Michael Fullan’s Report, “Great to Excellent:Launching the Next Stage of Ontario’s Education Agenda.”

Fullan’s report has two main thrusts: (1) the Ontario Education System was “good,” but over the past nine years, it has become “great,” and (2) rather than stay where it is, or even take a step backwards, the Ontario Education System now needs to focus on moving from “great” to “excellent.”

The report proposes that the system become “excellent” in the two following ways:

1.    Sustain Improvement;

2.    Engage in focused innovation relative to higher-order skills and qualities, test what works and spread effective practices.

As teachers, we must focus on continuing to raise our standards for student achievement, ensure that those who are at a disadvantage get the help they need, and build public confidence in the education system.  To promote higher-order skills and qualities within our students, we must interweave teaching, learning, and technology, with a focus on the six C’s:

1.    Character Education

2.    Citizenship

3.    Communication

4.    Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

5.    Collaboration

6.    Creativity & Imagination

The shift from 20th- to 21st-century learning means that qualities like “Citizenship” no longer refer only to one’s immediate community or country, but to global citizenship.  Qualities like “Collaboration” no longer refer solely to team work, but also to social networking.

My personal reflection on this information would be that the main problem that we as teachers face is that we have a very limited idea of what we’re actually going to have to prepare our students for, yet we also know exactly what the future will be like.  The advent of the internet is comparable to the invention of the printing press:

·         Ideas can be disseminated quickly and easily.

·         It’s much easier to undermine existing authorities, whether they be parental or governmental.

·         Censorship and copyright laws cannot keep up to the change, and much of the information to which we have access is unreliable.

The way in which society has educated its children has been predicated on the assumption that change as the world might, there are some things that children will always need to know, like reading, writing, and arithmetic.  However, technology has placed even these three R’s under threat.  Some educators are now asking these questions:

·         Why decode words on a page, or read silently, if a computer can read to you?

·         Why learn to hand-write if you’ll be typing for most of your adult life anyway?

·         Why add, subtract, multiply, or divide, when we’re now quite comfortable with calculators?

Though each of these questions terrifies me, some actually take us backwards, rather than forwards.  In Ancient Rome, texts were more often read aloud and in large groups than silently.  In the first half of the 20^th century, it was common practice to dictate one’s letters to a secretary, and in our day and age, we take much more responsibility for our personal finances than we have in the past, when we left it to the “experts.”  Why not get a little extra help from technology?

What we do know about the future is that (a) there are going to be a lot of problems, and (b) the problems are going to be complex.  So, the only thing we know for certain is that future generations need to be educated in such a manner that they think critically, ask higher-order questions, and persist when solutions evade them.

But really, have we ever needed or asked for anything less?