CORE's Ten Trends for 2014 have been published. This post considers the sixth of these trends: Learner orientation. We shall be publishing posts on one of the trends approximately each month. You are encouraged to comment or provide supporting links.
What do we mean by learner orientation?
It’s helpful to think of learner orientation in two ways: firstly, how does the learner orient themselves toward learning? And secondly, how does the school and community orient themselves towards supporting that learner?
Let’s look at the first one. For a long time, learners oriented themselves toward the end point of learning – the outcome, the grade, the qualification. It was assumed that if the learner emerged from school with a credential or certificate, that would open doors for them as they made their way through the world. And for a long time that was true — if you got school certificate or a degree, you could use that to secure a job and then learn all of the other required skills while in that job.
Impact
But now there are so many people with qualifications that having a credential or qualification is no longer enough. The various New Zealand curriculum documents have anticipated this shift toward actionable knowledge: applying our knowledge to make a contribution to our schools, communities and the wider world. The spirit of the NZC is to think about teaching learners, not subjects, and many people are thinking about ways to honour that spirit.
Which brings us to the second way of thinking about learner orientation: the way that schools are orienting themselves to support learners. When many of our current teachers were in formal education themselves, schools operated like benevolent dictatorships: teachers chose the right material and level of difficulty for the majority of the class and planned accordingly. But the more we learn about the brain and effective pedagogy, the more we know we need to meet all learners where they are, not where we’d like them to be. Everybody brings with them different levels of experience and interest when they arrive at class, and while some things need to be coherent and consistent, many other things need to be personalised. Frameworks like Universal Design for Learning encourage us to think about how different learners need things represented to them in order for learning to stick: reading written material, listening to a story, looking at a picture.
Implications and challenges
Wisely, some schools are taking a systems thinking approach to this view of learner orientation, recognising that in order to make progress, they need to reconsider not an individual component, but all of the elements we put in place to cause learning to occur:
- Pedagogy: how we teach. How we orient ourselves to meet learner preferences, and these preferences change through a sequence of learning.
- Curriculum: what we teach. How much is determined by the school and the curriculum documents, and how much space is left open for the students?
- Assessment: how can we give students more control and ownership over what counts as evidence of learning?
- Community: How do we tap into the learning opportunities and resources that exist in our communities
- Physical environment: If spaces are not designed to command and control, but to activate learning in all its many different forms, what physical environments are needed?
- Technology: what role does technology play in personalising learning? How can it make teachers lives easier so they can focus on the most important thing?
It’s not any one of these that will make a difference, but the interplay and the relationships between them all, and more importantly how we can look at the physical environments as an activator for this interplay. We call these physical environments modern learning environments, or flexible, open, agile environments, but really they’re just environments that allow us to orient ourselves towards the needs of learners.
Examples and links:
- MoE: Modern Learning Environments
- Personalized Learning: Trends for personalized learning
- The surprising truth about what motivates us
For more about the Ten Trends:
- Ten Trends 2014 (CORE website)
- About the Ten Trends (CORE website)
Mark Osborne
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[…] Trend 6: Learner Orientation by Mark Osborne from The CORE Education Blog. Number 6 for CORE Education’s Ten Trends for 2014 series. This post helps us to think about how students orient themselves towards learning. It also helps us consider how the school and community orients themselves towards supporting the learners. […]
Having been involved in education for 30+ years what you are proposing is nothing new. Just new jargon with modern technology added in. Good teachers have always used a variety of techniques to cover different learning styles. Certainly in my teacher training (and yes it was a Bachelor of Education Honours Degree UK in the early 1980's) we covered different learning styles. We even covered (and practiced in schools as part of our training) questioning skills, creating effective discussions, student led learning. I agree many of our current teachers have not been exposed to this sort of teacher training – in school professional learning is picking up the pieces or qualifications that are not fit for purpose. Alot of what is now done at "training" level is theory not practice and teachers are launched into a setting where there is so much going on they don't really have time to practice the art of effective teaching. I wonder why so many of our new teachers do not stay in the profession. I don't think is is hard to draw conclusions.
For goodness sake – let us focus on quality teaching and stop pretending these are new initiatives but acknowledge we are trying to get back on track from years of disasterous educational experiments.
Kia ora Charlotte,
Thanks for your comment. Indeed the idea of learner orientation has been around for a long time- we only need to look to look at the writings of pioneering educators like John Dewey to see it has a long heritage (Experience and Education in particular speaks to the importance of acknowledging the individual in education.) What we're saying here is that as more and more schools find their feet in a post-industrial education world, this trend is becoming more and more of a design feature for schools. Special mention must be made of the role that technology and 'next-generation learning environments' are playing in helping us to continue to evolve the ideas of Dewey and co.
Mark