The future of education
I haven’t spent a lot of time on the blog, Education Futures, but I stumbled upon the site through the following post (bordering on rant) around designing curriculum (and “design is mentioned 14 times) to be more relevant to students, as well as the use of games for teaching. You may recall another post on this blog about using games.
Games create challenge, purpose, skill implementation, and reading and acting with purpose. If it is a good game, they will play it. And the actions are the assessments. Games assess and evaluate by their very nature. If you do not have mastery, you do not move forward. But the game will also give you help if you need it—no one designs a game that is too hard. So, maybe we should be thinking about games and how we might begin to design and structure instruction and content. We are at risk of losing our kids to disinterest because we are becoming irrelevant in teaching to the minimum standard. We can do better for them.
The world of knowledge and information is at our fingertips and it will be creative skills that are needed to synthesise this information in meaningful ways. We need to create the next generation of design thinkers.
Justin, you’re absolutely correct — we need to create the next generation of design thinkers to successfully compete and thrive in a design- and innovation-based world! It seems to me, however, that this will require a systems-based approach that will require social and cultural transformations. What are your thoughts on that; and how would we go about it???
I’m not sure I have the answer. There appear to be fundamental failings within the education system. It is even simplistic for me to say churn out ‘design thinkers’ when I suppose I’m looking for a whole-brain education system. The last time I checked we are each born with two hemispheres, however the system appears to be heavily weighted to the left.
Speaking broadly again, the problem needs to be attacked at both ends, meaning creativity, collaboration and problem-based learning needs to be promoted at the youngest ages, as well as introducing the same into the curriculum of graduating business students and the next generation of designers. I am alarmed that even in mature design programmes, you continue to find a focus on the singular student vs. team-based projects and collaboration outside of your own discipline and with real industry.