Re Thinking Educational Spaces
Mark Osbourne (former DP at Albany Senior High) presented on re-envisioning how schools could be set up without traditional physical constraints. They created the high school from scratch and could do what ever they felt would be best...
The tried to think of how physical spaces effect relationships and learning.
They created some interesting spaces.
They rethought the idea of traditional
learning spaces.
Larger open spaces for learning.
[shopping mall cafeteria style learning?]
60% off all the classrooms in NZ are over 40 years old.
The question that we have for use at Waihi College is not so much lamenting the building we have. But to consider the influence of the environments we establish in our classrooms to aid learning for our students. Some interesting discussion that could be had here.
Mark highlighted that statistically in classrooms "80% of the questions we ask in schools have alreadly got the answers" and he challenged us to think about our education being centred more around
Tony Wagner - The Global Achievement Gap
There are three cruicial changes...
1. Knowledge is a commodity - it is free like air or water.
2. What the world cares about is not what you know but what you can do with that knowledge, and,
3. Any job that can be routine is rapidly being offshored or automated.
Water and air are not free, at least clean water and air are not free anymore. We do pay for water, and we do pay for clean air if we live in a city (aircon). Knowledge is also costly, the Internet might be free but the hardware to use it isn't, neither is the building, books and staff of a library. A poor premise to start a book with.
ReplyDeleteWagner was, I believe, trying to highlight that gone are the days where knowledge was something that the teacher/text possessed and was passed on to the student. With the use of IT (yes absolutely there are costs involved with access) the content is freely available. Here at Waihi College students regularly come to school with an internet device and can have access to wifi.
ReplyDeleteWagner's book certainly challenges, rightly or wrongly, many of the current assumptions that are the basis of modern education. I enjoy that this raises the level of debate. Thanks.