The Future of Education

Inspired by Microsoft’s 2014 ‘Future Decoded’ event, education writer Gerald Haigh ponders on the future of education, calling on visions of future classrooms, the power of disruption and the wisdom of an experienced Microsoft executive and observer of education in action across the globe.

What does the future hold for schools? Harder examinations? More tests? A tighter emphasis on basic skills? Will that suffice for the needs of an increasingly troubled and bewilderingly complex world?

In fact we now see a constant and strengthening stream of concern, in the UK and elsewhere, from all sides, including the world of business, at the emphasis which schools are forced to place on examination grades. Keynote speakers at the recent major ‘Future Decoded’ event run in London by Microsoft, added a collective voice, highlighting a growing demand for a broader kind of entrepreneurial, creative talent. The implications for education are clear. Even Jeremy Paxman, not an obvious technology evangelist, told us that, ‘The function of education is bound to change – to be not so much about acquiring information as learning to think.’

And so, on cue, later at the same event, Microsoft Vice President Anthony Salcito, global lead for education, told an audience of educators how he was finding shared awareness in all parts of the world, including those already recognised for successful education systems, of the need for real transformation of learning and teaching.

‘A school leader’s goal should not be to produce students with good grades, but to expand their path, their expectations and aspirations. Grades are one of the measures, but they are not the end goal…..The most important focus for the work of all of us engaged in education is to help students expect more from themselves.’

Anthony is evangelical in his insistence that the vision for learning must come ahead of technology. And yet, of course, we find it impossible to talk about the future of education without speculating about computers and magical devices. This, for example, from 1958, has the obligatory sci-fi flavour.

‘Plans for a push-button school have already been proposed by Dr. Simon Ramo, science faculty member at California Institute of Technology. Teaching would be by means of sound movies and mechanical tabulating machines. Pupils would record attendance and answer questions by pushing buttons.’

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It’s a remarkably prescient scenario in many ways. What’s easy to miss, though – because we still share Dr Ramo’s pushbutton mindset – is that his future classroom, for all its whizz-bangery, remains fundamentally unchanged. The technology is there solely to make the teacher’s traditional job easier. A moment’s reflection shows that the same assumption is common today. Interactive whiteboards, automated attendance systems, online storage and sharing of traditional resources and lesson plans, are much less transformational than they appear. In fact, by making current practice more comfortable, and diverting attention to the excitement of choosing and implementing technology (setting what Anthony Salcito calls ‘access goals’) they may positively hinder true disruptive innovation. How often did we see that in schools that raced to be first with

tablets for all students? First, there was choosing the device, then the frustrations of rolling out and troubleshooting, followed by the headscratching business of working out how to fit the devices into already established routines and pedagogies. How long before the learning benefits started to appear?

Real progress - and it’s both ironic and perfectly logical that this message comes from Microsoft, a global technology business – does not actually start with the technology at all. First must come clarity about what education is actually for. Surely, if our fragile world is to be saved and made better for those who follow us, we will badly need people who, as well being clever, are creatively disruptive -- bold, awkward, self-confident, and capable of thinking the unthinkable. If there was a collective message from ‘Future Decoded’ that was it.

What this means for schools is, essentially, much more flexibility – the freedom to build broad learning paths that follow individual needs and opportunities rather than being corralled within internal structures and external tests. And, here, at last, is where technology comes into its own, with the power to make the necessary transformative freedom achievable and effective. But it’s still not really about buying shiny boxes. They will be there, but look through and beyond them and you will find the sophisticated levels of collaboration and communication that are made so much more possible by the cloud. Already, in many schools, time-honoured terms like ‘homework’ and ‘classwork’ have been made meaningless by anytime/anywhere learning and flipped classrooms, readily achievable with device-agnostic cloud technology. We see primary classrooms where children work in collaborative groups, which, thanks to the cloud and Microsoft’s Office 365 in particular, exist outside the time and space of the classroom. Next to go under the microscope, without a doubt, will be that traditional straitjacket, the school timetable. ‘Ah, there’s the bell. Sorry, we’ll pick that up again next week.’ Why is that defensible in technology-rich 2014? At ‘Future Decoded’ Anthony Salcito spoke of ‘making time the variable’ so that each student could stay with their learning until they had mastered it sufficiently to move on. With today’s technology that could happen right now.

Pick up that thread, follow it forward in time, and you start to question the need for other taken-for-granted institutions – ‘lesson’, ‘classroom’, even ‘school’ itself. The way to the future, then, for educators, is to forget all about tinkering with inherited top-down structures and practices and begin again by looking at what the world is waiting for, and at the learner’s needs and aspirations, with the confidence that the technology will be there to make it all possible.

However (there’s always one of those is there not?) none of this will work unless leaders across the world, including particularly school leaders, want it. Turning to Anthony Salcito again, we hear him time and again insisting on the importance of visionary leadership.

‘If you want collaboration and sharing, a culture of innovation, you train the leaders first.’

(Anthony Salcito’s ‘Daily edventures’ blog http://dailyedventures.com/ has a continuous stream of stories about students and teachers who illustrate the importance of self-belief motivation)