What does learning need to look like in a rapidly changing world?

What does learning need to look like today? 

In our fast-moving world, the evolution to a knowledge-based economy has flipped what our students need to learn for their future careers - in jobs that we probably can’t even imagine yet. Consequently, there is intense scrutiny and interest in education and how educators can create the right environment for students to become 21st-century citizens with the skills they need to flourish and succeed. The framing question in the influential OECD volume, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice is, “What should schooling, teaching and, most especially, learning look like in this rapidly changing world?” (Dumont, Istance and Benavides 2). The scope of the OECD work on the nature of learning is wide, and I highly recommend you read it, with the Executive Summary a useful place to start for the time-limited leader. For now, I am going to touch briefly on the educational agenda it sets out, and how it can be fostered practically in the classroom. 

What skills do students need for the 21st century?

First, it’s important to define what we mean by the skills that students will need for the 21st century. ATC21S (Assessment & Teaching of 21st Century Skills) have defined ten 21st-century skills into four broad categories, grouped under the acronym KSAVE: knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and ethics. The four broad categories are:

• Ways of thinking  -- critical thinking, problem-solving, decision making and creativity, innovation and understanding the process of learning itself
• Tools for working -- ICT literacy and information literacy
• Ways of working  --  communication and collaboration
• Ways of living in the world  -- such as being a local and global citizen, careers and personal and social responsibility.

So, whilst reading, writing, mathematics and science are the cornerstones of education, learning must go further to prepare students for employment in the 21st century. 

Lifelong learning and adaptive expertise  - the ability to flex knowledge and skills to different situations now and in the future - are at the heart of these skills, and the recommendation is that their foundations should be laid from an early age in the school environment. 

A demanding educational agenda 

The Nature of Learning publication defines this demanding educational agenda as a framework of principles, interrelated and which all must be present, all of the time to be truly successful. It must be learner-centered, structured and well-designed, profoundly personalized, inclusive and social.  (Dumont, Istance and Benavides 18).

Powerful learning of this kind makes great demands on teachers and school districts who may have already been through past evolutions of educational reform that were difficult to relate to actual practices and workflows.

The Hāpara Instructional Suite has been purpose built to ensure learner-centered, well-designed, profoundly personalized, inclusive and social learning.

What can this look like in the classroom?

Now let’s turn to some elements of this educational agenda and show how they can be practically related to the classroom with examples from the Hāpara Instructional Suite. 

Learner-centered 

A learner-centered environment shifts away from direct instruction; instead, the teacher acts as a facilitator, providing feedback and answering questions when needed. Learner-centered learning provides more choice to the learner and more collaboration between learners. 

We developed Hāpara Workspace to provide teachers with a space to build assignments and projects that can easily be differentiated for groups or individuals. It gives learners an easy, intuitive interface to manage their assignments, customize their submissions and participate in learning. In this example, the teacher has created a Workspace to guide students through an art project. By using Workspace students can do the assignment at their own pace, and the teacher is fostering student agency by allowing them to choose which artist to research, culminating in a hands-on project for students to demonstrate their learning that they can share with their classmates to further the knowledge growth of the class. The emphasis on learner choice and discovery means that students have active involvement and internal motivation in their learning; promoting curiosity and a willingness to learn. 

Structured and well-designed 

Dumont, Istance and Benavides state that “to be “learner-centered” requires careful design and high levels of professionalism” which “still leaves ample room for inquiry and autonomous learning” (18). For me, an element of this is ensuring that the technological tools used in the classroom are fit for purpose, transformational in nature, based on principles of learning and provide training and development opportunities for educators. I talk about this more here. Truly useful technological platforms serve and streamline existing workflows, rather than creating extra ones. This is true of Hāpara’s instructional suite of tools, and we truly specialize in enabling personalization can be achieved without overwhelming teachers’ workloads.

Profoundly personalized 

There is a profound need for sensitivity to student differences and detailed, tailored feedback in a learner-centered environment (Dumont, Istance and Benavides 18). Hāpara Workspace makes it easy for teachers to personalize and differentiate to meet the needs of every single learner and to create learning environments that are flexible because they can create and curate content and aggregate learning tools in one single learning space. Teachers can create groups of students to work together, by ability or cross-ability, and have them access and see different content. In this Workspace, we can see that the teacher has grouped her learners by ability, which enables them to then cross-group learners to work collaboratively on reading comprehension strategies. In terms of detailed tailored feedback educators can use Hāpara Highlights to give in-the-moment individual feedback to learners right to their screens. Providing formative feedback like comments on Google Docs is a lot more streamlined as Teacher Dashboard gives teachers access to student files and Drives from a single, easy-to-view dashboard.

Social

The OECD report, in its principles, indicates that learning best occurs when it is social in nature, students can work together and they have a sense of community (Dumont, Istance and Benavides 18). Technology has had to step to the fore, as when the report was written in 2010, the global pandemic and its implications could not have been fathomed. Building student-teacher and student-student relationships are still possible in an online setting, but it does have to be more intentional and focused. Our own Professional Learning Manager Lindy Hockenbary has written a great article about how to build student relationships with games, which are great fun and help build a sense of community essential for an effective learning environment. There are a great number of creative ways to implement relationship building including synchronous meetings one-on-one, maintaining consistent communication and feedback, and creating clear expectations for behaviors provides a reassuring framework, whether in an online or hybrid context.   

Conclusions

The science of learning is expanded rapidly and makes important the rethinking of what is taught, how it is taught, and how learning is assessed. This has profound implications for not only teachers and their expertise, but the technology platforms they use, national curriculums and indeed the very routines of daily learning in schools. The global pandemic has accelerated change to education with manifold challenges and changing at pace to deliver learning in new ways. The good news is that most of our Hāpara educators and providers across the globe have risen to this abrupt gear change in their approach to learning. In future blogs, I’ll be sharing my thoughts and ideas about those changes and the future of learning. 

Wayne Poncia is a well-known thought leader in educational innovation in the United States and Canada and CEO of Hāpara, who power connected learning for teachers and learners.

Works cited

Dumont, H., D. Istance and F. Benavides (eds.) (2010), “Executive summary” in, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264086487-2-en

“ATC21S.” Assessment & Teaching of 21st Century Skills, www.atc21s.org/.