The perfect storm for a new paradigm for learning.

The introduction of a new paradigm is always controversial.

There is inevitably opposition to any paradigm change, especially from those who have spent their careers working within the earlier paradigm.

Change, if it occurs, usually takes considerable time and occurs through a growing shift in professional allegiances from the leading professionals. Schools have existed at least since ancient Greece , ancient Rome, ancient India , and ancient China .

The Byzantine Empire had an established schooling system beginning at the primary level. Ancient schools weren't like the schools we know today, though.

The earliest schools often focused more on teaching skills and passing along religious values, rather than teaching specific subject areas like is common today.

As society became more complex and schools become ever more institutionalised, educational experience became less directly related to daily life, less a matter of showing and learning in the context of the real world, and more abstracted from practice, more a matter of distilling, telling, and learning things out of context.

This concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allowed children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating.

As society gradually attached more and more importance to education, it also tried to formulate the overall objectives, content, organisation, and strategies of education which has led us to the formal approaches which we are experiencing in schools now.

Education in schools operates within a prevailing paradigm with underpinnings, concepts, rules and methods that guide what we recognise as ‘normal’ practice.

It is clear to all that the global environment has changed and that school education is no longer delivering the results it was expected to deliver when the paradigm is focused on teaching and learning.

The role of the curriculum at present as it has been for years is to dictate what teachers should teach and students should learn.

Indeed age related expectations suggest that all students in a grade level need to mastering the content of their age related curriculum and should master if they put in the effort. The is the dictated curriculum - mostly mandated.

Where students they don’t master the content and skills, teachers are told to intervene with additional support or to differentiate their teaching to provide additional support so that students can access the ‘ curriculum’.

There is an assumption that all students are capable of success and should achieve the expected level’s for their age if they work hard and are supported

However, there is a vast array of evidence that demonstrates that student learning and performance are not consistent with these assumptions and indeed the current paradigm under which schools operate. There seems to be an acceptance that we have perhaps 10 per cent of students in any year group will achieve above expected - a number of students who are more or less equally ready for, and able to benefit from, the same year-level curriculum and a significant number that cannot and will not access the curriculum and will FAIL.

This mismatch in paradigm begins to blame teachers for not differentiating or providing additional support, not enough funding, lazy students, poverty, culture, not enough language support, practice with exams, rote learning - whereas really it’s the paradigm that needs change. 

Possible ways forward… imagine and be creative. 

Imagine a curriculum which was vertically arranged - a learning journey. Not age related, but  inferring what a student is ready to learn next when they have demonstrated proficiency with learning evidence whatever their age.

Mastery is at present replaced with haste and pressure from the teachers who want to complete the curriculum.

How about allowing students’ to progress to the next learning level when there is evidence that the have mastered and applied the previous level. Students will progress at their own personal level - being inspired by developing self-belief, positive reinforcement, self-confidence and a high self-esteem without having to compete with age related peers.

Students are empowered to progress at the rates at which they learn.

Students who require more time have it; those ready to move to the next level are able to do so. It's not a race - or filling the pail.

Curricula developed vertically are likely to be appropriate for most students means that the number of curricula to be developed under this alternative approach would be similar to the current number of year-level curricula. 

So this immediately raises the question of how a teacher could manage a classroom in which students were working at eight different levels. In practice, teachers say that they cannot manage students working at two or three different levels which is where a paradigm shift is required. 

An innovative approach to learning and measuring learning.

Resistance is inevitable until schools are able to make a crucial step in the way that they think. Any change to the what school learning looks like has an enormous impact on the future of teaching and learning. Piloting helps, perhaps allowing teachers to use this paradigm in a few areas of learning, within their curriculum showing learner evidence of learning with the student voice as key. 

The restructured curriculum should be based on a simple paradigm with a small number of essential concepts, to be developed in increasing depth over a number of years. This alternative paradigm is not asking for an immediate change in structuring the curriculum but new ways of thinking about teaching, learning, assessment and reporting - a new norm.

What we require is a different approach to learning. Vertical learning journeys.

Strategies can include flipped classrooms, online forums, project based learning, lines of inquiry, quality and high expectations - there is no need to discount scholarly lectures, dictation, reading, writing, good teaching!

It’s the personalising of the approach and the recognition that we are teaching children who are living and growing up in a new generation, they are not the same, and they learn at different rates with different learning styles.

Maybe curriculum standards can be tweaked.

Most important lets share the learning intentions, let go and allow learners to learn in their own way. We have the software which students can use to take control of their own learning and to provide the neurotic teacher with evidence that the learner not only grasps the learning intention but has moved way ahead already.

The conversation is no longer about whether the heart has a left and a right ventricle which is affected by exercise or other - but the thinking is about whether technology has the ability to replace the expected norms and extend life.  

The paradigm shift required is in the classroom as this is where the highly interactive learning experiences should happen. 

This is where the analysis, the evaluation, the creativity.

Cultural expectations about progress and standards, attainment and grades - we cannot throw the baby out of the bath, I agree. Diagnostic assessments help us as teachers get the data that we want - GL CAT4 for example, gives us an insight into the child’s cognitive ability. MAP, Progress in Science, Cambridge Checkpoints, e-assessments, IGCSE, NGRT, PASS, SATS, YARC - an endless array of - what if used to assess potential.

This helps us as educators and it also enables us to satisfy the norms - is a child learning as expected for his / her age. 

Central to the learning paradigm shift is to empower the learner to move forward, fast, if they are able to, sometimes very fast, to encourage the positive can do attitude, to allow the learner to be creative, to be excited, to be solution based, to keep igniting the fire of passion for continuous learning, to never accept the status quo, to have a restless spirit with perhaps more than just thinking critically and analytically continues to inspire innate curiosity. 

The teachers commitment is to recognising evidence of learning in different forms.

There is no need for a revolution, a dismantling of current pedagogical tools, but a drive towards creating innovative learning opportunities for our children to succeed using the objectives that we can still set.   This is the perfect storm for a "paradigm shift" as we question the validity of tests for evidence of progress and learning and begin to let go and trust the students.

Meaning of paradigm shift.

Thomas Kuhn, the well-known physicist, philosopher and historian of science, was born 94 years ago.

He went on to become an important and broad-ranging thinker, and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Kuhn's 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, transformed the philosophy of science and changed the way many scientists think about their work.

But his influence extended well beyond the academy: The book seeped into popular culture.

One measure of his influence is the widespread use of the term "paradigm shift," which he introduced in articulating his views about how science changes over time.

Nowadays a paradigm shift, inspired by Kuhn is defined as "an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way."

Can we take Kuhn's inflence and ideology forward and begin to seep into popular cultural change for the paradigm of what learning really is ans why indeed to we need to learn ... for the climate is changing, changing very rapidly.

Dr. Tassos Anastasiades