Newsletter 48: What happens when you take away the spoon from a spoon-feeding exercise?

A lot has happened in the world of education since I started Colegio Ikigai in January 2022, and I am delighted in many ways that the school has been able to assimilate into its daily work with the students many of the new technological tools that have emerged over the last two and a half years. From AI to the Metaverse, to VR and Augmented Reality, running a small and agile school has helped us to integrate many of our new ideas into the curriculum with relative ease. I use the term 'relative ease' quite liberally in this context, as we still have our battles to win, but at least it is possible if you are fully in control of the pedagogical decisions in your own school.

AI as a theme has seemingly taken over the chattering class of the educational world. While other breakout technologies are ripe for disruption in education, it is AI that dominates the narrative. Yet, it seems to me that still the biggest surprise, the most noteworthy gamble that paid off for us as a school, was to nail our pedagogy to Phenomenon-Based Learning or Project-Based Learning. What I have discovered over the past two and a half years is that Phenomenon-Based Learning, and only Phenomenon-Based Learning in school, allows us to center on three very important instructional paradigm shifts, which I believe are at the heart of a new forms of pedagogical instruction, especially when further adding in Education 3.0 concepts. The goal is not to transform learning; the goal is to transform the learner, and when we started, I had the sequence of this logic in reverse.

There are no exams at Colegio Ikigai. I went for the hardest concept first, and of course, Phenomenon-Based Learning gave me at least a pretext to say this to a very conservative marketplace. I acted more on my instinct by removing exams from the school and took a chance that some other parents would feel the same as me. The summative assessment piece in school then had to become the creative portfolio, but for the first six months, I constantly felt there was something wrong with Colegio Ikigai. It took me a long time to deschool myself from this concept, with many sleepless nights to boot. Russell John Cailey By removing exams from the school's narrative, there has been a slow but coherent shift in students' attitudes from an obligation to learn towards a desire to learn. I also understand what a privileged position I am in, as practically no school currently in operation could ever just remove exams from its instructional methodology or evaluative design. But because we started as a post-pandemic start-up, we have made this leap, as painful as it was at first. A school without exams has been a revelation for me and our students. Enjoyment and engagement with learning have improved, and whenever I explain this particular characteristic of our school to other interested teachers, none of them ever criticize me for this decision. Far from it, most look at me like I made the most sane and matter-of-fact comment this century. This means we can take away the spoon from the spoon-feeding exercise, but what happened next?

You must, at this point, take a deep breath and realize as a teacher your job is to be in control of learning, but as a guide or a facilitator, you are not in control of the students' learning. This was also a deschooling exercise for me and our parents, but not our students. By putting the student front and center for their own project, their own failure, or their own success, project-based learning challenges the learner to take responsibility for their own learning. The spoon-feeding disappears without the exams looming large, and the significant learning experience, which is based on parents attending and celebrating the work regardless of the quality, has been a major shift in my thinking about why our learners are motivated to learn in the first place. Schools have too many aggressive policies on learning, in my opinion, and most are counterintuitive to why children want to learn and enjoy the world. The key question for teachers is: can you lose control of your student's learning? If you are a 'teacher,' the answer is no; you simply cannot do this. However, if you are a mentor, guide, or facilitator, it is a prerequisite to unlocking the creative curriculum.

The creative curriculum. Once you start to work in a school space where there is no exam pressure, academic standards do not decline; they shoot upwards as children also start to deschool themselves from counterintuitive learning concepts school want to press on the learner. The facilitator of learning, when freed from the teaching, starts to understand that it is often teaching that gets in the way of learning and the creative curriculum can step forward.

We teach how to use new technology correctly, we explain where we would like to see the projects going, and aim to guide the process from the side, but the selection of content and quality of the final outcome do not reside with me, the teacher; they reside with the learner and their significant learning experience.

There has been a lot of insight in these last two years, and AI really makes us question a lot of fundimental concepts about education, but the key to thinking different about the learniner, has to be based on: can you change the instructional design of your classroom for your new academic year 2024-2025.

What an amazing sequence of ideas here from Kai Vacher and Matthew Savage in the use of data in school. Yes I know, this is not what you think, it not at all about how we think about data.

Here is a round up interesting news items in the world of Education 3.0:

What? It took me forever to learn about STEAM. Can it be true?

This is going to disrupt teenage lives; the concept of falling in love with a machine.

Are you a noob to the world of gaming language, check out how this changing the langauge of our gen-alphas.

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