Keeping Fresh: Lessons in Teaching for the Future

This is it: the homestretch - the final two weeks in the era that began as an adventure and ended in Education. Yes, capital E for Education. Twelve years ago, I hopped on a plane to South Korea with two checked bags in the cargo, a bucket list of cliche travel goals, and a contract to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) in a small town somewhere in the Taebaek Mountains. It was just two months out from graduation. I had no idea what I was getting into, and it took me nearly a decade to acknowledge that this was more than just my 23-year-old self putting off adulting for juuuust a little while longer. It was the first step on a career path to one of society's most sacred spaces: the classroom.

Autumn hike up Mt. Taebaek, aka my backyard

Moving on from all this rosy retrospection and skipping right through to the point. I'm finally making the big leap from my cozy ESL situation and into the world of subject teaching on the secondary school level. The time in between will be spent on personal stuff - spending some long and overdue QT with friends and family. All that exciting stuff to one side, it's a definite priority for me to stay fresh on what's going on in Education. The struggle of information over-saturation is just as real for this profession, and this blog series is one way to keep my head from going under. It's also a way to keep the passion alive, a way of drawing inspiration from all the incredible teachers out there. So here we go. Episode One: Thoughts on GOOD Magazine's Mini Documentary, Future Learning

This roughly thirteen-minute video gives some food for thought on these three questions:

1. Why does relevance matter?

The mini-doc opened up with Professor Sugata Mitra asking, "What for?" It immediately spoke to me, as THIS was THE main question I always asked when I was a student. I was most motivated to learn when the lesson is practical, enjoyable, or both. I always had trouble accepting reasons like, "It's just part of the curriculum" or "You'll make loads of money if you know how to (insert seemingly irrelevant skill)..." This was true when I was a student, and it is STILL true now in my adult life. I believe it to be true of my students, as well. One of my biggest frustrations teaching ESL in South Korea is that English language learning is neither immediately applicable for the students nor is it enjoyable for most of them. Under these circumstances, trying to create lessons that showed how English might be relevant was like re-inventing the wheel. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. This was particularly true in my lower level classes.

" In education, we provide problems separate from the relevance or the context in which they need to be used. That’s one of the reasons why students are so disengaged. In the video game world, it’s all about exploration. You solve a problem when you bump into it, and in fact, that provides the relevance for solving the problem." -Ntiedo Etuk ,Founder, and CEO DimensionU

Ntiedo talks about how video gamers pretty much cracked the code on the cognitive science behind how to keep people engaged. They key is that they didn't set out on some scientific mission, they just created a game that they'd love to play. This is something to take into the classroom again and again and again. Write the lessons in ways that I, as a student, would have loved them to be taught. 2. What happens when we motivate students to take ownership over their learning process?

This is an incredibly innovative notion that questions the role of a teacher. The traditional classroom asks students to focus their attention on the teacher. There is also an implicit request for them to put aside their own independent thoughts and wholly trust in the information given to them. However, today's classrooms are slowly shifting that focus away from the teacher, allowing students to take more responsibility for their own education. Taken a step further, the "absence of the teacher" in a given learning environment signals a return to trusting the innate creativity and instinct for learning that exists within everyone. Finding ways to draw those elements out from our students has to be our focus as effective teachers, particularly as we head for a future where anything can happen and where a growth mindset is one of the keys to success.

Speaking of the future...

3. What does a future-proof curriculum look like? Back to Professor Mitra on this one. He says that reading comprehension is one of the most essential skills for this generation. Students gotta have it. Teachers gotta teach it. We're getting hit with information from all fronts. It is imperative that we have the tools to understand how to sift through it and to understand it. Second on our future-proof curriculum: the ability to search for and retrieve information. It's all out there, and it's our job to teach our students how to access it. This brings us to the last element of the curriculum: the critical thinking skills to to process the information and to question it. This is THE most important part of teaching for the future.

When I think about the use of technology in the classroom and whether or not I should be using it, these three points are exactly what come to mind. I'd be remiss in my role as a teacher if I didn't maximize the use of the myriad resources available to me. This is especially true as students are becoming more tech savvy and their learning styles come to reflect this change. As we move into a future that will become even more heavily reliant on technology, my role as a teacher would be to guide students and ensure that technology serves to supplement their learning process rather than as a substitute for the development of their cognitive learning skills.