Saving the Dinosaur: Adapting Your Conception of Education to Meet the Flip

Visualize a monolithic and inflexible system in which the user is unable to penetrate the structure or even bend the framework. If you've got a vision of  a caveman trapped in a box canyon without a rope or even a rudimentary stone hammer to chip away at the canyon walls, then you've seen the peril that too many American school children face.

The current model of American Education is like a dinosaur that will inevitably be forced to change or die like the triceratops, stegosaurus and tyrannosaurus 65 million years before. Some folks argue whether it was an impact event, or a failure to adapt to changing conditions that led to the demise of our paleolithic predecessors, but unless we are struck with a meteor of catastrophic proportions in the next few years, it will be our failure to recognize and adapt to the changing conditions so ever-present in the world around us. While educational reformers yap about this and that, and blather away about standards-based learning, academic rigor and other educational psychobabble, the simple truth is that nothing will really have a meaningful impact until we realize that the conditions for learning have changed, and students are bored by our current monolithic, teacher-centered cookie-cutter system.

While we waste our precious time playing the political shell-game trying to stay one-step ahead of big-brother, and the achievement score police, who keep making standardized testing companies like ACT rich as the pockets of sleaze-ball politicos get fuller, we're allowing American education to die on the vine. Sadly, as we continue to bore students with ACT prep-driven instruction, and retest after practice retest them into zombie-like creatures, we continue to prohibit the very tools that students do their most effective learning with. How ironic is it that most students process and retain more information from their cell phones, MP3 players and other devices, which bring the world to them via YouTube, social media sites like Twitter and countless other highly adaptable and individualized technologies then they learned in school last year?

Have I angered you, yet? Sorry, but be angry; then realize that the conditions have changed, or to put it in educational psychobabble, the paradigm has shifted, and if you want to exist, you'll need to adapt. That means allowing kids to use their I pads, wikis and facebook to learn; it's what they do best. It means changing the way you do things in your class, and realizing it's about your students not you. It means accepting that the best tools for instruction are tools that your students are, most-likely,  more proficient with than you. It means that you have to actually use technology to create project-based 21st century global lessons, instead of using that fancy new whiteboard to replace the blackboard, or merely putting your notes into a simple power point or using the computer lab so that kids can utilize Microsoft Word. While those are all fine tools, you are basically using technology to replace the status quo, as University of Texas at Arlington Professor Andrew Berning has coined, which is at least a step, but understand for all intents and purposes you are still doing the same thing you've always done. Challenge yourself to learn about Web 2.O, cloud computing or an even fresher technology, and as you do, realize the benefits of those tools as you're asked to differentiate and individualize instruction.

But where is the evidence for the claims I've made, and what are some of the best  practices for adapting your current methods?

Check back later, for part two of Saving the Dinosaur: Adapting Your Conception of Education to Meet the Flip to find those answers, and see my prediction about where education is going in the next few years. In the meantime, check out the link below for a little precursor:

Tech tool boosts learning, study confirms