Educational Disruption #2

The second disruption in the report Recombinant Education: Regenerating the learning ecosystem by The KnowledgeWorks Foundation is High-Fidelity Living.  At first blush, the title might seem a bit esoteric.  However, this disruption is a direct result of the new world we live in.  One of the challenges that we face in the 21^st Century is making sense of all of the information and data that is available to us.  I would posit that our most important task as a school is to help students gain the skills necessary to “make sense” of all of the information vying for their attention.  Just think about the amount of information available to you every day.  You can Google any topic and find hundreds of web sites, research reports, blogs, Twitter and Face book accounts dealing with your topic.  Separating the useful (and valid) information from propaganda or poor information is an essential skill for all of us to have if we are to live effectively in a globalized world.  In education, the amount of information can be overwhelming, but is essential for educating students.  Effectively using data to help students learn will be (and is) and essential component of 21^st Century education.

The future of education will be dominated by customizing educational experiences for our students.  Penn-Trafford has three pilot programs in place this year that focus solely on customizing education for students. What we are finding out that we need a lot of information about the child to determine where they are in a specific place in time in their curriculum.  We also need to know the best learning modality for the students that coincide with their place in the curriculum.  Gathering this information and using it to help students is invaluable for our teachers.  In the future, PT will utilize programs that will allow teachers to make a “dashboard” of student data which will allow them to customize education at a granular level. Penn-Trafford has been using programs that adjust student instruction based on “real time” data for a few years. Currently, our schools utilize intervention reading programs (for accelerated and struggling students) that can determine the reading level of a student based on their use of the program (on the computer) and “move” students to a more difficult reading level as their reading improves.  This is just the beginning of how PT will use data to help teachers enhance their classroom instruction.  By using data to customize education, school systems will be able to more effectively pinpoint resources to help students learn in the best way possible.