Most people are familiar with the ‘old’ way of doing things in schools: the teacher controlled what was learnt, how it was learnt, even where and when it was learnt. But, a key trend that has characterised education in recent times is a move towards learners owning more of the process: to give them ‘the power to act’ in their learning, or what is known as ‘agency’.

Agency can take many forms; from being empowered to make decisions about which activity to move onto next, through to learners being empowered to take positive social action in their communities. Providing choices in learning (whether to work individually or in a group; whether to provide evidence of learning using a piece of writing or a diagram) is an important factor in engagement, which is, in turn, a contributor to student learning and success.

Many schools now build student agency by doing things like fostering a greater sense of ownership and self-efficacy in learning, inviting students to have a voice in that learning, and even to take more control over the way things are learnt. Student-led inquiries are one way to build agency, as learners often control not only the challenge or question that is explored, but also the method of investigation, the tools that are used, the action taken as a result of the inquiry and the means of demonstrating evidence of learning.

Trend 7: Maker culture

Explanation

Think of learning at its earliest stage: a baby learning to play with blocks or manipulate objects in three-dimensional space. It’s something our human brains are hard-wired to do. Researchers like Dewey and Piaget talk about constructivism — suggesting that learning is an active process in which people actively construct knowledge from their experience in the world. People don’t get ideas; they make them.

This idea of making, of building, of constructing has a strong basis in research. Active learning increases the rate of learning faster than passive learning, Even just watching others build or make things fires up parts of our brain that are left untouched by passive learning.

Drivers

While the maker movement has been around in many forms, it’s only now that we’re starting to see technology catch up with our aspirations for a powerful, active, authentic education.

Last week we broke the bracket that holds up the towel rail in our bathroom. The first thing I thought was not, Oh, we’ve broken it. It was, ‘I wish we had a 3D printer’, because I could scan the broken part with the camera on my phone and print a replacement. And it’s conceivable that there will be some form of 3D printer in many homes in the foreseeable future.

Is your Nan having trouble plugging the jug in because of her arthritis? There’s your year 7 technology project. Learning about insects for science? Design and print a bug hotel that you can attach to a tree or a fence for insects to live in. It’s all made possible by the magic of 3D printing, and a range of 3D modelling software tools — many of which are open source, and able to be installed on any computer learners have access to.

Another driver of the maker movement has been the emergence of a powerful suite of small electronic microprocessors that you can programme with a bit of code. Often they snap together with little extras, like light or movement sensors or Bluetooth and wireless modules, and all of a sudden you’ve got something you can attach a solar panel and a rechargeable battery to, and you’ve got a completely self-contained, internet-connected data-gathering tool. So what do you want to know? How many sunlight hours there have been each day this month? What the maximum temperature has been every day this week? The Arduino and the Raspberry Pi might sound like funny names, but they are essentially tiny, extremely affordable computers that kids can add onto like Lego. This freedom and creativity is right at the heart of the maker movement.

Impact

Art, technology, design, music, film, science all come crashing together in the maker movement. Want to sew a circuit into the hoodie you wear when you ride your bike home so that a arrow made of LED lights on your back indicates which way you’re turning? Piece of cake. What about creating an interactive sculpture that changes colour depending on the kind of music you play in the room? No trouble.

So what’s the impact of all this possibility on learning? For one thing we've got more chance to unleash student creativity than ever before. And we’ve got the chance to really connect our learning to the real world for another. We can solve real world problems and give students the kind of voice and confidence

Implications

Our learners have the ability to shape and bend all sorts of technology to meet their needs — we need to make sure we’re giving them plenty of opportunities to do it. Design thinking and design processes need to be central to our planning, not only to meet learners’ needs but also to give them opportunities to meet others’ needs. We can start small:

• Grab a little electronics starter kit that doesn’t need soldering skills or even a good understanding of circuits, and see what your kids can do with it.
• Talk to your principal about getting a 3D printer
• Download something like Sketchup so kids can start playing around.

Because, it’s this playfulness that’s at the heart of the maker movement.

Examples and links:

• Arduino website
• Make: DIY projects
• Instructables website
• MAKERS ORG NZ
• Ponoko: Laser cutting and engraving
• LilyPad: sewable electronic pieces

For more about the Ten Trends:

• Ten Trends 2014 (CORE website)
• About the Ten Trends (CORE website)

Trend 6: Learner orientation

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)