I just watched another great video by Sir Ken Robinson. He speaks about reforming education from the industrial model to the agricultural model.
"When we look at reforming education and transforming it, it is not about cloning a system, it is about customizing it to your circumstances and personalizing education for people you are teaching. And doing that, I think is the answer to the future. Because it is not about scaling a new solution, it is about creating a movement in education which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on their personalized curriculum. Technology, combined with extraordinary talents of teachers provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. I urge you to get involve in it because it is vital not only to ourselves but the future of our children.
We have to change from the industrial model to the agriculture model where each school can be flourishing tomorrow."
In the industrial model, students are mass produced, often linear and almost identical, in batches, and for conformity. This is the model that many of us went through. Singapore, in its early years of development adopted this model to produce thousands of engineers, accountants, technicians, etc. It successfully solved the 1970s- 1980s labor shortage problem where Singapore need massive specialized labor to work in its developing industry, particularly the manufacturing sector.
This model however is not as effective now for the industries we have are diverse. A new problem now exist: the demands for skills required are very wide-ranging and they are hard to predict! Sir Ken Robinson talks about revolutionizing and changing to the agricultural model. We cannot predict the outcome of human development, but we can create the right conditions for them to flourish. The way to do so is to customize and personalize teaching.
What he says rhymes with what we are trying to do at Republic Polytechnic (RP). We try to personalize education as much as possible.
In RP, we adopt a pedagogy called Problem-based Learning. We have broad curriculum which students have to follow. These are presented to the students in the form of problems that they have to solve. The unique feature of our system is that we allow students to explore what they deemed is important for them to solve these problems. Our teachers (we call facilitators) help the students understand the issues they have, brainstorm, formulate, develop their solutions, and eventually critique their solutions. We allow students to set their own boundaries and we help them learn in the process of doing so.
What I like about what we have here: Sometimes, they learn more than just the content, they learn about their learning process, and more importantly they learn more about themselves.
It does sound like what Sir Ken Robinson speaks about...revolutionizing education.
Maybe we shouldn't call ourselves facilitators anymore...we are the agriculturist.
Agriculturist of the homo sapiens plant
0 comments:
Post a Comment