An excess of remote experts

Ever wondered why so many kids find the concepts we teach and the methods we use too abstract, and disconnected from how they participate in the world? And why what they know life away from school - their tacit knowledge - does not seem to matter.

We teachers start our careers prepared to make a difference. But it's so much easier to follow a textbook, prescribed syllabus or worksheets developed by an expert. An expert - who knows what is best for us - who tells us what to teach, and how to teach, and places us in ever tighter straight-jackets, with fewer and fewer degrees of freedom.

But some of the latest research coming out of the Teach for America program shows that teachers who really make a difference, several grades in a year, are those who give themselves wings to fly, who do it their way, who focus on what they believe is best for their kids, right now. Who place the object of study at the center of the learning process, so young people can directly touch and feel it. And who constantly try new methods.

At the heart of what we mostly do as teachers, there is a remote expert who seems to "control" what we do, someone who has developed yet another new way to teach, with proven metrics to support it's use. And some content expert somewhere in the dim, distant past who decided what we collectively know about the world.

Much of the knowledge we have accumulated has been discussed, debated and resolved into concepts, models, theories and methods. We deliver these prepared "packages" to kids. Like so much of the food that we find on supermarket shelves these days. So far from the source kids don't know milk is from cows and bacon was once an animal.

As the image shows, the learner is three steps removed from the object of study.

We mostly learn how to teach in lecture theaters. Instructed by an expert, who learned from another expert. We learn to practice the art of teaching alongside teachers, many of whom are reluctant users of new technologies and stick with "tried and true" methods of "chalk and talk". In some countries, efforts to improve schools performance has lead to the phenomenon of "teach to the test". To keep our funding and our jobs. The hand of the remote expert shows up again..

From a systems thinking point of view, its a self-reinforcing loop that ensures the old ways persist. If the education system was a brain, we would all have obsessive-compulsive disorder, cycling through the same old patterns, unable to create new neural pathway, and snipping off the least used neural circuits to reinforce the old patterns.

And although I'm one of those so called "experts", with my doctorate of philosophy in education, which says I am an expert in a microscopically small part of the education universe, I am in favor of placing the learner center stage as a co-creator of new pedagogical possibilities. And the teacher center stage, with all the encouragement in the world to be inventive and daring. Because there is an urgent need. The jobs of today and tomorrow require these thinking and relating skills.

Here are some questions to explore this issue:

1. What were the main pedagogical techniques when you went to school? Make a list.

2. What are the main pedagogical techniques that are used in the school classroom today?

3.  Here is a list of skills that today's young person needs to be successful in the workplace. Explain how students learn these skills in today's classroom. Working in teams. Leading and managing teams. Using thinking and decision making skills routinely e.g. problem solving, strategy, project planning, feedback, design thinking or learning processes for others to follow, make sense out of data, use a computer to create a spreadsheet, write a report, conduct a meeting, deliver a presentation, make a movie, tape an interview, create a model, contribute to and edit a wiki, write and edit a blog.

4. Brainstorm a list of tools (or functions on tools e.g Google Maps) that students use in their personal lives that are not used in the classroom, e.g. mobile phone.

5. Describe what you could do as a teacher to invent or encourage students do invent new pedagogical/learning methods using new and existing tools.

6. Describe what you could do as a teacher to encourage students to experiment with and create new models and theories about real events/things in their lives that are relevant to science, mathematics, social studies etc.