Education for innovation

I have been doing  a lot of thinking about what the future shape of education might be. This began because we have some opportunities arising at work for curriculum change, fed by an appetite for some change. Recent events have offered additional insights that are tantalising to say the least.

Recently a number of us visited some of the folk at the EPIC centre in Christchurch. The insights gained form the visit and ensuing conversations were exciting to say the least, and perhaps the most exciting aspect of those conversations is the changing nature of society, and the need to promote innovation and wealth creation.

This started some ears back with Jane Gilbert's work 'Catching the knowledge wave' in which she effectively redefined knowledge for know stuff to doing stuff. For Jane knowledge had ceased to be a noun and become a verb. The EPIC guys want people who can work independently, people who are literate and numerate, but people who can think outside the square. These people are risk takers, not necessarily with wealth, but certainly with ideas.

I posed the question in a recent parent newsletter:

"I want to know how we produce even more innovative and creative people who become leaders in their fields. And when I mention fields of endeavour I have to confess to being agnostic. We might well be talking about the gaming industry or industrial chemistry, but equally we might be talking about the music industry or the law, the visual arts or languages and diplomacy."

As  a consequence I have been pondering how schools need to restructure to do this. The purpose of this post isn't to answer that question but to consider the circumstances in which that question must be answered. My own early thinking went something like this:

We want teenagers to be innovators, we want them to be risk takers (in terms of their thinking, they are already risk takers in many other ways). We want them to move beyond knowing to thinking. Of course this doesn't mean that we abandon knowing stuff. You can't think in a vacuum, you have to know stuff in order to be able to think about it. The question then is how do we encourage teens to get to know stuff in a way that is engaging, in a way that harnesses their natural risk taking behaviour in a safe way?

At this point in time I created this obstacle in my mind: education is currently judged by society by a series of outcomes best defined in terms of the assessment/qualifications system, in our case NCEA. We have to teach to the assessment in order to get the results that communities judge as a measure of a quality school and a quality education, so we are hide bound to stay with the current industrial model of education organised into time periods, subject specialists and classrooms.

The alternative is to have students organise and manage projects focussed on innovation and creativity. But hang on, most teens can't do that particularly well, so maybe we just have a 'select few' able to do this while the remainder conform to the traditional models?

Well actually maybe more teens can do this than we think. And maybe NCEA isn't the constraint we think it is at all, maybe it is the liberating mechanism with its modular approach. Maybe we have taken up the cudgel with NCEA (of which I am a fan by the way) by simply slotting it into the old industrial system. Maybe in fact NCEA is the system for the new era of innovation. I am increasingly of the opinion that we have allowed ourselves to become fixated with the process of assessment rather than the process of education and learning. It is from the latter two that innovation comes, not from the former.

I have much more thinking to do on this, but this is enough writing for one post. I have a friend who writes tediously long posts that I rarely read because they are just too long.

I found this blog post by Claire Amos "Navigating the space between educational paradigms"
challenging and interesting. You may too.