Schools of the future #1

This is part 1 in a series about what I envisage schools of the future will look like.

I've been thinking about education and the direction it will take in the future. I am looking at trends I see developing as well as drawing inspiration from great educational thinkers such as Sir Ken Robinson and Richard Gerver. I am also very conscious of the work of Susan Cain about personality types. I see ICT becoming a big part of the education process. The IB are talking a lot about student agency in their publications relating to the release of the new PYP. The power of the internet to enable people to learn what they want, when they want, in becoming more prevailing. The fact that people, and students in particular, engage in learning online through various media points to the fact that students can be engaged in learning and they can do it without a teacher. I think that schools in the future have to embrace this type of learning.
Standardised testing has become almost as commonplace as people using the internet to learn. Government departments and community leaders all demand that schools are accountable for the money they spend. I agree that there needs to be some assessment of learning, but I have significant problems with standardised testing.
As schools empower students to have greater agency over their own learning, the more we will need some way to monitor student learning and guide future learning. I believe ICT can again be utilised for this purpose. By combining the tasks of independent learning and monitoring of progress, ICT can become a useful partner for schools.
The focus of learning will be on skill development. Students will be in control of their learning and receive support and assistance from teachers and the School Learning Platform (SLP). Students will be allocated a peer aged group, a group similar to a house and a teacher/advisor. Students will engage in activities based on their current skill level and ability and their experience with content areas. These activities may group together students of various ages. The time, the amount of time and location will vary according to the needs of the group. This will allow students to manage their time with the assistance of the SLP.
The role of the teacher becomes one of developing relationships with the students they are advising, monitoring their progress against established benchmarks and creating and supervising learning projects.
Adapting the IB framework to this model would require the school to track content area exposure, conceptual understanding and engagement with transdisciplinary themes. I would suggest a points system where students needed to accrue points in certain areas and that learning engagements displayed the point values. This would enable students to make choices but also cover a breadth of experiences.