It can be sad that today’s learners have brains that are built to survive at a much faster pace. As someone who grew up without technology, I remember long days of playing outside or kicking a rock all the way to school. I would constantly lose track of time because I was engaged in something. I was able to focus on something long enough that I could really get good at it. Those were amazing times. I feel lucky to have lived in a time before technology was so prevalent. But, it’s also pretty incredible that our brains can adapt to our changing world and have in fact adapted. Whether we like it or not, the kids we are teaching have different brains. It is harder for them to slow down; harder to focus on things that don’t seem relevant. Their brains are questioning, in a sea of so much information, do I really need to expend energy on remembering this? From our perspective, these kids may look apathetic, unmotivated, and disengaged but maybe their brains are trying to be #futureready.
What does school look like for these brains?
So the question is, what does school look like for these brains? What does teaching and learning look like for these brains? The skills that are getting less intuitive for these learners are skills that don’t involve technology and those are just the skills these kids will need; human skills. Skills like collaboration, creativity, and mindfulness are skills that now need explicit teaching. There has been a move away from stand and deliver instruction for some time now but teachers continue to encounter apathy and motivation issues as they attempt to teach in a more student-centered way. It’s hard and most systems don’t support these new structures. Many of the systems even work against these new systems. Teachers need high impact, low effort strategies. They need small shifts that make seismic changes in order to keep up with the pace of change.
Proficiency-based learning
Proficiency-based (PBL) or competency-based learning, when done well, supports the development of these skills and can help us plan for teaching these #futureready brains in an efficient way. It can also help us eliminate the problems we are encountering that appear to be unmotivation, apathy, and disengagement. Unfortunately, many people have been introduced to PBL in a way that focuses on a change in grading. When done well, proficiency-based instruction is designed so that learners are engaging in the entirety of a proficiency and this increases relevance which increases engagement and motivation for learning. This design process requires us to shift our planning process from a linear, scaffolded process to a more holistic process. Learning the parts of a car doesn’t help you drive until you understand how the parts interact with the rest of the driving process. We don’t have to pass a test on the parts of a car before we can learn to drive. Instead of thinking about learning as a series of increasingly complex sets of understandings, we need to think about learning as a holistic process.
PBL is NOT about getting rid of content
While this does require us to think bigger about the skills that we are teaching, it doesn’t mean students aren’t learning any content. It means they are learning content through the lens of a larger, more immediately necessary skill. Because learners brains are craving bigger skills like collaboration and creativity, because their brains know this is what they will need, learning through this lens becomes more relevant.
Being a #futureready learner
Kids aren’t the only ones who have changing brains. They may have been born with pervasive technology already in place. They may not remember a time of pay phones and three television channels but our brains are also being impacted. Our own learning processes need to change as well. We need to be #futureready too. Because we need to learn at such a rapid pace, we need to make sure that we are using efficient learning strategies that can be built upon rather than scrapping everything and starting new each year. What does this look like?