Friday 12 June 2009

Ricardo Semlar - transforming schools

Ricardo Semlar of Lumiar asked the audience 'what are we running after?'.

He talked about the importance of asking questions, especially 'why'. He had some important messages about learning....

Schools have changed very little in 100 years in both structure or content. Elements such as class size and lesson length have remained largely unchanged. Similarly, the curriculum was created by subject experts who developed curriculum in silos unrelated to each other. This resulted in a retention rate in the American curriculum of just 7% after 10 years.

Ricardo said children are 'factory built' to learn and yet what we put in front of them is heavily contrived.

Their attention span - often said to be diminishing - can vary between minutes and hours depending on the activity. Hours spent on blogs and Facebook help children to develop social skills, empathy and emotional intelligence, the very things that we are struggling to put back into work and office situations in real life.

Ricardo said that all our attempts to innovate have failed as we keep trying to make marginal changes that never work like staff training and staff deployment - they are too little too late.

Lumiar created two new roles - the tutor who guides children through emotional, social and personal aspects of learning and the master, an expert voice.

They then developed a set of competencies that represent what children need to learn and the tutor regularly meets with both parent and child. The children are encouraged to join projects and to use the internet and social tools to support self study. This provides the pupils with scope to learn where their energy lies, be that Star Wars, modern art, fashion. The children are motivated to learn and each follows a unique path. Children themselves negotiate their own learning and this has reduced issues around discipline and attendance.

Looking to the future, as e-learning itself goes through a revolution and the world has better connectivity, there are more opportunities for children to lead their own learning. Old learning in old formats must go if we are to improve the life chances of children and young people.

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