The 5th of October each year is World Teachers’ Day. The theme of the day is, “The teachers we need for the education we want”. So, what is the education we want and who are the teachers we need to deliver that?
Adults in ancient pre-literate societies would teach their children life skills and pass down cultural, spiritual, and historical information through storytelling, dance, and or song. Teaching isn’t new, and we have had lots of effective teaching before now too. So, what’s important about education today. This will vary depending upon whether you are talking about formal, or informal education, and where in the world the education occurs. But what cuts across most of these categories is access to information. Today we have almost instant access to information with just a few taps on our smart phones. This makes knowing facts easier than ever before. And because virtually anyone can access information anytime, having some guidance about what we really do need to know is still useful too. But what really counts today is that people need to be able to analyse information and to understand how to corroborate facts and interrelate them. And thereby turn these facts into knowledge that makes their lives, and the lives of others better. Just because something is posted on Facebook or is read to you on the news doesn’t make it 100% right, or 100% wrong either. Faced with overwhelming amounts of information most people tend to switch off, become cynical, or disappear down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. In short, we need to be taught how to think, more than we need to be taught what to think. It seems to me that the teaching of how to think is at best an infrequent by product of our western formal education system. Today we are seeing a rise of authoritarianism, mainly on the right politically. And even calls for book bans in developed western democracies (USA). This suggests that what we are currently teaching isn’t working and needs to be changed urgently. Add to this the rise in artificial intelligence (AI), which though it can be harnessed for good in education, will potentially be used to subvert current teaching methods. The result of this being that more people could successfully pass through education knowing less than people do today, because of an over reliance on AI to do the thinking for them. So, the education we should want today is how to think, and what about the teachers we need.
All of us are teachers, but only some of us will have the formal title of teacher. Everyone who has a child is a teacher, everyone who has friends or family is a teacher, anyone who has work colleagues is a teacher. All of us can be teachers. I think that it is less important to think about the ‘teachers we need’ than it is to think about the teaching skills we all need to possess, to some extent. The most important teaching skill any teacher needs is passion for the subject being taught. When this oozes out of the teacher it inspires and motivates others to learn. Next is a positive representation of the students’ ability to learn, their ability to find their own way to learn. And next is a dedication to lifelong improvement, for themselves and for others. After that then a handful of skills are useful too. This is not an exhaustive list but does include –
- Use of storytelling. All of us learn better if the lesson is delivered or at least illustrated through story structure.
- Organising content in a logical manner. This includes thinking about the chunk size (big picture and detail) and the order and sequence of how the information is presented. But it also includes covering all the senses, and engaging students with why they need to learn what they are being taught.
- Challenging students to think for themselves rather than just presenting information to learn by rote.
- Teaching students how to learn, how to revise, how to do exams, and how to find what they are passionate about in life.
How should we evaluate educational outcomes. If you are accountable, you want something measurable and controllable. So that you know which levers to pull to get the results you desire. Squaring this circle isn’t easy. I think that we should measure our overall educational outcomes based on the maturity and development of our whole society. But how do you measure that! I do have some sympathy with government and educational administrators who have to wrestle with this idea. Nevertheless, I think we have maybe shifted too far to quantitative measures rather than more qualitative ones. But I do accept that evaluating educational outcomes isn’t an easy thing to do.
Education never ends, there is always more to learn. The purpose of education is to help people grow into effective members of society, independent people who can work interdependently with others. Today I see society changing more rapidly than our educational systems are, and that we are already seeing the negative effects of this.
My guess is that in the short to medium term education won’t change. It hasn’t really changed much in the last 40 years, so I don’t see any major change happening anytime soon. Education is unlikely to be the driving force for change, but once we see that society needs to change then we will need to upgrade how we educate ourselves. In the meantime, a special thank you to all teachers out there, formal ones, informal ones, those who teach adults, and those who teach children. One day your recognition and reward will match your importance, one day.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela
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