Future Wise E-Book

David Perkins

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 439

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

How to teach big understandings and the ideas that matter most Everyone has an opinion about education, and teachers face pressures from Common Core content standards, high-stakes testing, and countless other directions. But how do we know what today's learners will really need to know in the future? Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World is a toolkit for approaching that question with new insight. There is no one answer to the question of what's worth teaching, but with the tools in this book, you'll be one step closer to constructing a curriculum that prepares students for whatever situations they might face in the future. K-12 teachers and administrators play a crucial role in building a thriving society. David Perkins, founding member and co-director of Project Zero at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, argues that curriculum is one of the most important elements of making students ready for the world of tomorrow. In Future Wise, you'll learn concepts, curriculum criteria, and techniques for prioritizing content so you can guide students toward the big understandings that matter. * Understand how learners use knowledge in life after graduation * Learn strategies for teaching critical thinking and addressing big questions * Identify top priorities when it comes to disciplines and content areas * Gain curriculum design skills that make the most of learning across the years of education Future Wise presents a brand new framework for thinking about education. Curriculum can be one of the hardest things for teachers and administrators to change, but David Perkins shows that only by reimagining what we teach can we lead students down the road to functional knowledge. Future Wise is the practical guidebook you need to embark on this important quest.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Learning for Tomorrow

The Expanding Universe of What’s Worth Learning

I’m Not Going to Tell You What’s Worth Learning

Chapter 1: Lifeworthy Learning

Lifeworthy as Key

Lifeworthy at Risk

When Lifeworthy Thrives

When Lifeworthy Falters

Lifeworthy versus Quadratic Equations

Questing for Lifeworthy

Educating for the Unknown

Toward Reimagining Education

Chapter 2: Learning Agendas

The Achievement Agenda and Its Soft Tires

The Information Agenda and Its Soft Tires

The Expertise Agenda and Its Soft Tires

From Hierarchy to Network

Dancing Mitosis and Designing a Fish

Chapter 3: Big Understandings

Big Understandings Defined

Big and Not So Big

Big for Life

The Big Choice

The Big Save

Smart Sampling

Chapter 4: Big Questions

Big Questions Defined

Wondering At and Wondering About

Socratic Questions

Living Questions

Question Kits

But What about Answers?

Chapter 5: Lifeready Learning

Understanding as Thinking

Building Understanding through Thinking

Understanding as Applying

Understanding as Noticing

Understanding as Caring

Understanding Democracy

Pathways and Pitfalls

The Place of Digital Technologies

Chapter 6: The Seven Seas of Knowledge

What Good Is Poetry?

What Good Is Algebra?

What Good from A to Z?

What Good for Younger Learners?

Chapter 7: Ways of Knowing

Three Ways of Knowing

Ways of Knowing in General

Euclid’s Way

Bacon’s Way

Ways of Learning Ways of Knowing

Junior Ways of Knowing

Newton’s Way

Thucydides’ Way

Byways and Highways

Chapter 8: Buckets of Knowledge

The Bucket Problem

Renewing the Disciplines

Reframing the Disciplines

Crosstopics

Crosstopics as Bucket Systems

Better Bucket Systems

Chapter 9: Big Know-How

Listing Big Know-How

Teaching Big Know-How

Mapping Big Know-How

Accommodating Big Know-How

Choosing Big Know-How

The Inverted Curriculum

Chapter 10: Knowledge on the Way to Wisdom

Yesterday on the Way to Tomorrow

Learning on the Way to Lifeworthy

Quest 1: Identifying Lifeworthy Learning

Quest 2: Choosing Lifeworthy Learning

Quest 3: Teaching for Lifeworthy Learning

Quest 4: Constructing a Lifeworthy Curriculum

Knowledge on the Way to Wisdom

Two Blind Men Crossing a Log

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

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Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Praise for Future Wise

Rarely does a book come along that can change the way we view the world. This is a must-read book, not just for educators, but for anyone who cares about education or, indeed, lifelong learning. David Perkins does not tell the reader what should be learned in schools—he takes the reader on a journey to clarify his or her own goals and priorities for “lifeworthy learning,” a truly enlightening journey.

—Charles M. Reigeluth, professor emeritus, School of Education, Indiana University

We are working so hard in this country on the details of school improvement that we don’t always stop to consider the big picture—if we are actually working on the right things. David Perkins has long helped us address the essential question of how do we know what students understand. In this important book he gives us a fresh vision of curriculum: how do we know what is worth teaching and learning?

—Ron Berger, chief academic officer, Expeditionary Learning

This book prescribes a wise future for schools by David Perkins, the author of Smart Schools and Outsmarting IQ, continuing his tradition of insightful, visionary, and original analyses of the present and the forthcoming future for education. Educators, policy makers, researchers: you cannot afford missing this book.

—Gavriel Salomon, professor emeritus, University of Haifa, Israel

Future Wise

EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN FOR A CHANGING WORLD

David N. Perkins

Cover design by Adrian Morgan

Cover images: young boy photograph © George Manga | Getty young girl photograph © Ashok Rodrigues | Getty

Copyright © 2014 by David N. Perkins. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and is on file with the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-118-84408-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-118-84407-6 (ebk)

ISBN 978-1-118-84415-1 (ebk)

To grandchildren Maggie, David, and Sandy: may you always be learners.

Acknowledgments

Where to begin? Beginning at the beginning does not work so well because there is no one source, rather, a maze of tributaries merging into the flow of these pages.

Certainly one principal tributary was an inquiry on teaching for understanding I conducted during the 1990s with principal colleagues Howard Gardner, Vito Perrone, and Martha Stone Wiske, with generous support from the Spencer Foundation. We developed a research-based conception of understanding and how to foster it. The resulting practices have found places in thousands of classrooms, informed further research, and get some press in this book as well.

Another more recent tributary was my previous book Making Learning Whole (Jossey-Bass, 2009), an effort to synthesize key ideas about the teaching-learning process. That book includes brief appearances of some of the themes expanded in these pages. In a loose sense, one might view this book as a companion to it, the earlier work addressing mostly how teaching and learning work best, this one mostly what is worth learning.

Further impetus came from a doctoral dissertation by Nina Abraham Palmer completed in 2009 under my supervision, “What Is Worth Teaching and Why: How Do We Justify What We Teach?” Nina’s research had quite a different focus from this book, addressing from an analytical philosophical perspective patterns of justification for what’s worth teaching, but the conversations around the dissertation enriched my own thinking about what’s worth teaching.

The ideas shared here show influences of several other projects in which I’ve been involved in recent years. Let me mention with appreciation: WIDE World, a teacher and school leader online learning initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, developed with longtime colleagues Martha Stone Wiske, David Zarowin, and Nathan Finch, and both supported and insightfully advised by Al and Kate Merck; the evolution of the Visible Thinking initiative, first at Lemshaga Akademi near Stockholm, with principal colleagues Shari Tishman and Ron Ritchhart and support from Peter Wallenberg and the Stiftelsen Carpe Vitam Foundation and later at Bialik College, Melbourne, with principal colleagues Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church and support from the college itself and the Abe and Vera Dorevitch Foundation; the Learning Innovations Laboratory program that Daniel Wilson and I and several other colleagues conduct at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for leaders concerned with learning in corporate and government organizations; and the Leading Learning That Matters initiative, also with Daniel Wilson, sponsored by Independent Schools of Victoria, Australia, in coordination with Director of the Development Centre Karin Morrison and Chief Executive Michelle Green.

Several individuals directly supported writing this book. Justin Reich helped me think about history education, compiling sources and insightfully analyzing trends and dilemmas. Later, he led a group examining similar issues in science education. The members of the group were Therese Arsenault, Kathryn Ribay, Gene Roundtree, and Monica Yudron. All of these contributions were tremendously valuable.

Flossie Chua assisted me with sources and their interpretations over the last years of writing. This book would have considerably less to offer were it not for her help. Both her systematicity and her insights have been valuable for a number of themes taken up in these pages, including, for example, surveying ways in which schools and nations treat twenty-first-century skills, and compiling practices for selecting literature for instruction. Let me add thanks to Jim Reese for contributing to that. Much appreciation also goes to Stephanie Kacoyanis, and, before her, Mandanna Farhoodi, who assisted with references and various practical mechanics of crafting the book.

A couple of years ago, several faculty members of the American School in London, led by Peter Lutkoski, undertook a small project with Veronica Boix Mansilla and me around ways to identify big understandings. Our work together was fruitful and its resonances appear in various ways in this book.

More generally, I have had conversations with many other friends and colleagues about what’s worth learning for the modern era. They marshaled their insights in areas from the arts to literature to politics to everyday life. They shared not only their own thoughts but examples and sources. Here is a partial list in alphabetical order, but I am sure I have missed people, for which I apologize: Angela Bermudez, Kier Bloomer, Mario Carretero, Alan Collins, Phillip Cousins, Diane Downs, Noel Entwistle, Hunter Gehlbach, Tina Grotzer, Linor Hadar, Lois Hetland, Jim Reese, Rod Rock, Gavriel Salomon, Yesha Sivan, David Eddy Spicer, Sid Strauss, Bob Swartz, Shari Tishman, Chris Unger, Daniel Wilson, and Carlos Vasco. Where I have drawn on their published work, I have included citations. Besides educators, partners in conversation have been my wife, Ann; sons Tom and Ted, and Ted’s wife, Doina, and grandchildren Maggie, David, and Sandy.

Classes I have taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have served directly and indirectly as test beds for some of the ideas here. Indeed, I used early drafts of certain chapters as readings in a few of those classes. The mix of enthusiasm, questions, and critique was an important shaping factor.

Important in much the same way has been the opportunity to share versions of these ideas with educators in a number of conference settings in various parts of the world. Again, the responses have proved immensely valuable.

This entire endeavor has been informed by the rich context of Project Zero, a research and development organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Education not so far from its fiftieth birthday, led currently by Daniel Wilson, before that by Shari Tishman, before that by Steve Seidel, and before that by Howard Gardner and me, founding members and both of us still actively involved. The organization was created by the noted philosopher Nelson Goodman. I have sought to draw the ideas and examples in this book from a wide range of sources across education and educational research, but I have certainly dipped most often into the diverse work of my colleagues at Project Zero.

I also extend gratitude to my long-time agent, Faith Hamlin of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, for her counsel regarding and help placing this book, as with others over the years; and to Kate Bradford, my editor at Jossey-Bass, and her colleagues for their feedback and support.

For sure, there would be no river of words between these covers without the many sources named above. Of course, none is to be blamed for any whirlpools readers may encounter. Blame me by all means, but I’m hoping for a reasonably smooth flow.

Introduction:Learning for Tomorrow

In the back of the class, there’s that idly waving hand. You’ve been teaching long enough to be pretty sure that hand was going to go up as soon as you got started on this topic, and so it does, with an annoying indolence. All right. You gesture toward the hand, Let’s hear it.

And of course Smartass says, “Why do we need to know this?”