RE-CONCEPTUALISING LEARNING FOR THE KNOWLEDGE ERA

1. RE-CONCEPTUALISING LEARNING FOR THE KNOWLEDGE ERA

2. ANGELICA Hello, I am Angelica. I am fifteen years old. I really don�t have much of a past. In fact, I am the future.

3. ANGELICA You need to understand what I am learning to believe, how I think about my future, what my world view is. You and I both want me to be a success in the world which I will enter as an adult and which I will be responsible for. In future days I will admire you for being able to look forward with me and help me define what I need to learn.

4. ANGELICA On present life expectancy, I will live until I am over 80. I will be alive and well into the 2070�s and my children will live to see the twenty-second century. Can you imagine what the world will be like for them? My world is already very different from the one you have grown up in.

5. ANGELICA On present life expectancy, I will live until I am over 80. I will be alive and well into the 2070�s and my children will live to see the twenty-second century. Can you imagine what the world will be like for them?

6. ANGELICA During my lifetime, a planet wide economic system will operate, controlled�by business networks and regional centres of trade like Singapore, Bangkok, Mexico City, Los Angeles�Sydney. By the time I am thirty, there will be more people living in Shanghai than are living in the whole of the South Pacific, including Australia�

7. ANGELICA When I complete my twelve years of schooling, everyone of my classmates will be expected to undertake some form of post-school training�In-service training, retraining for a different occupation, professional development and continuous study or learning will be facts of life for my generation throughout our lives.

8. ANGELICA �.Education is all about hope, isn�t it? Your schooling was. My school-teachers are very important to me because they tell me how to deal with the future-the long, long future.

9. ANGELICA �So, do you know what to teach me? Do you know what I need to learn? And do you know how to teach me? Are you confident that you can design a curriculum which will equip me to live in my world?

10. SOME CRITICAL QUESTIONS Is our year 9-10 curriculum credential driven or educationally driven? What should it be? How well do we cater for the one third of students who do not go to University? Do they get an education that prepares them for life beyond Overnewton?

11. SOME CRITICAL QUESTIONS What is the purpose of school? What is the Overnewton Senior School experience? Do we get students to jump assessment �hoops� or is learning at the core of what we do? Has assessment overtaken learning? Is assessment being used as a tool of control?

12. THE CHALLENGES Knowledge Era V Industrial Era - 7C�s - critical thinking and doing - creativity - collaboration - cross cultural understanding - communication - computing - career and self reliance

13. THE CHALLENGES What does this mean for curriculum at Overnewton? Abandonment

14. THE CHALLENGES Core V Electives IQ and EI � people skills, leadership capabilities, empathy, decision making and problem solving, self management and intuition

15. THE CHALLENGES Subject Disciplines V Inter-disciplinary studies Distributed leadership

16. THE FUTURE IS CREATED TODAY �What will Singapore be like 40 years from now?� I can�t tell you.� But I can tell you it must be a totally different Singapore because if it is the same as it is today, we�re dead.� We will be irrelevant, marginalized, the world will be different.� You may want to be the same, but you can�t be the same.� Therefore, we have to remake Singapore-our economy, our education system, our mindsets, our city.� (2005). Lee Hsien Loong - Prime Minister of Singapore

17. NEW PROFESSIONALISM Up to 55% of the variance in learning outcomes is the result not of different schools or backgrounds, but what happens in classrooms within schools Performance Management System - Student Voice - Peers - Self

18. THE CURRICULUM IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY Why do we continue to say that excursions, House activities, long weekends etc. mean that we cannot complete our year 10 curriculum when we know this is the case, but continue to design a curriculum that does not take this into account?

19. A NEW ASSESSMENT FOCUS Do we over assess? Why do some subjects assess three times more than others? Why do we have a flood of assessment at the end of a semester? Assessment must now include social competencies (EI) All reporting of academic and social competencies should be done online and on a continuum

20. SELF DIRECTED LEARNERS VELS and re-designing year 10 Self Directed Learners � What does this mean at Overnewton? How do we teach to ensure students develop into independent, life long learners?

21. FAILURE???? �The solution to �failure� in education is not to attempt to shield students from the experiences of challenge and failure, or try to expunge the word from our education lexicon. Rather, the challenge is to develop in students a healthy attitude to failure; ideally to see failure as a part of life, essential to growth, a temporary setback, and a learning opportunity.

22. INDEPENDENT LEARNERS? Above all, children in our schools need to be encouraged to see failure as an event, not a state: to develop a deep belief that, although all humans experience failure, no human is a failure.� (Masters, 2006).

23. RE-IMAGINING YEAR 10 Politics, Poverty and Personalities Abandon existing structures Small Business Practice THE POSSIBILITIES ARE AS ENDLESS AS OUR IMAGINATION

24. RE-IMAGINING YEAR 10 Take risks Model innovation, imagination and creativity Take ownership Continually improve and evaluate Assess for learning not control Involve students in setting curriculum and assessment Work in teams (staff and students) Have fun Let learning determine the program not a predetermined curriculum

25. RE-IMAGINING YEAR 10 MODEL FAILURE

26. RE-IMAGINING YEAR 10 What is our new year 10 imaginary or metaphor? If we continue with the metaphor of a journey, where do students travel, what is the purpose of their trip and how do they get there?

27. RE-IMAGINING YEAR 10 IT IS TIME TO RE-WRITE THE SCRIPT

28. RE-IMAGINING YEAR 10 � We must ensure that the provision of education for the next generation is not limited by the structure of schooling we have inherited from the past, and we must shed the debilitating defensiveness with which we often respond to proposals for change� (Cuttance, 2001: 11).

29. Travelling in the dark �In conversation in the deep of the night on a Greyhound Bus, an Australian tourist revealed that he had only two more States to go and he could say he had been to every State in the Union. He had just travelled through Utah in the dark!� (Aitkin, 1999:6)

30. Travelling in the dark The experience of a number of students at Year 10 is not dissimilar to the Australian traveller. How many students do we have travelling in the dark and whilst they complete a three year learning journey in the Senior School they find themselves ill equipped to travel alone and either do not go on to further study or drop out of their first year of university

31. THE TWO �T�S TINKER OR TRANSFORM! IT�S OUR CHOICE!