What big questions should be guiding our educational practice?

Scott McLeod in his keynote address shared his fantasy of wanting to address an audience of principals, MPs and Ministry officials about the big shifts required in education.

The changing economic landscape where work and purchasing are outsourced to anywhere on the globe has put information industries particularly, under threat.  Given that education is an information industry how much longer can we continue to pretend that minor tweaks will reshape education in line with the new economic landscape, he asks?

Schools are still modeled along the lines of supplying workers for a manufacturing world.  As David Warwick says:  ‘No generation in history has even been so thoroughly prepared for the industrial age.

The 21^st Century is here.  Learning will be more digital, mobile, open, accessible, online, more computer-mediated, self-directed, enquiry and project based.  What implications does this have for our schools?

He challenges us by asking:

• Are you preparing your students for the creative abstract jobs that will be the new world of work?
• Are you providing students the opportunities to use Bloom’s higher order thinking skills – to analyze, evaluate and create?
• And to do this using relevant technological tools?

Scott ended his keynote by posing two questions:

• If you are not doing what you should be – that is using rich technology enabled thinking skills on a regular basis – should you get to keep your job?

• If as a school leader who is not facilitating this – should you keep your job?