Right now, millions of educators are grappling with the new realities of teaching in the midst of a pandemic: extended periods of disruption, a lack of resources to support evolving needs and absent or disengaged students whose learning loss will prove to be enormously difficult to overcome with each passing week.
However, education has always had a great deal of messy issues to resolve. Equity and access to quality education are not the mainstay of learning for the majority of the world’s population, and there have been more than enough examples to demonstrate how this sector has struggled to reconfigure itself to a 21st Century context.
Over the past few months, we have expected schools to be resilient against the acceleration of these issues, but the exhaustion of simply surviving has begun to take its toll. We know what doesn’t work, so now is the opportune time to make that fundamental shift and create new, sustainable, pathways to quality education.
Value vs Success
There has always been an apparent divergence between mainstream curriculum learning and the skills required to thrive in the real world. Academic ‘success’ still largely relies on outdated methods of assessment which generally lack an understanding of what learning actually looks like.
However, there are good examples of how schools have begun to evolve this mindset. Rather than focus on arbitrary measures of learning, The London Interdisciplinary School focuses instead on building global competencies which in turn, create intellectually curious problem solvers who are capable of dealing with the complexity of the real world.
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