When students are agents in their learning, that is, when they play an active role in deciding what and how they will learn, they tend to show greater motivation to learn and are more likely to define objectives for their learning. These students are also more likely to have “learned how to learn” – an invaluable skill that they can and will use throughout
their lives.
According to a NSA study, our creativity is drained by our education. As we learn to excel at convergent thinking–or the ability to focus and hone our thoughts–we squash our instinct for divergent, or generative, thought. The 5-year-old in us never goes away, though.
The focus is now on competency-based education! How do we do this??
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
When the industrial revolution took hold, people started leaving their farms and homes in droves, flocking to the cities to find new work. Factories were born as was a system of free education for the masses to feed the production line’s insatiable appetite for workers.
A century or so later, ChatGPT 4 has burst onto the scene marking a new revolution (which actually began, unnoticed, a decade or so ago).
Do not live in silos! Introduce relevance to our teaching and learning. “WE TEACH STUDENTS NOT SUBJECTS”.
The agency imbued by high-performance learning equips, empowers and enables students to test what’s possible and act with an increased sense of purpose that can guide them to thrive in their world. We in schools must cultivate the development of this individual agency within the interdependence of relationships and positive group culture. We need to acknowledge the impact that the collective experience, inspired by the challenge of a set of agreed standards for excellence, and influenced by leadership that constructs and tells a compelling narrative from yesterday to today to tomorrow, can have on the courage and conviction of individuals to engage in an ongoing process of growth in the adaptive expertise and self-efficacy that are characterised by the purpose, persistence and reflection of high-performance learning.