An amazing opportunity to reshape education

[snoop1130]

 

Schools are open in Thailand so everyone can breath a sigh of relief. Parents have stopped being unpaid substitute teachers, academic staff are no longer staring into screens and children can learn with their friends once more. But maybe this is more than a time for wanting everything to go back to the ways they were. This could just be the best of times to ask where schools should be going next. Lockdowns around the world have shown us that the imaginative and the resourceful thrive even in the face of adversity. Schools have taken a step forward by embracing the existing technology and shaping it to fit needs in an emergency. Now that the worst may be over schools should not stop or go backwards, they should be looking to the future.

     

Imagine going to sleep in 1995 and waking up in early in 2020. You might wonder why nobody was wearing baggy tops, what happened to grunge music or what fresh-faced teenager Leonardo di Caprio was doing these days. You may have read about a new idea called e-banking and wondered if banks had changed much while you were away. How you would react when you found you could do all your banking, your shopping and even run your business from a tiny pocket sized computer?

 

Banking is unrecognisiable from the 1990s as are so many of our industries and sectors. Banks have hardly any branches and the new ones have none at all. The world’s biggest taxi company owns no cars, the most popular media company creates no content, the world’s most valuable retailer carries no stock, the biggest accommodation provider owns no property and the owner of the largest selection of movies has no cinemas. In fact, banks don’t even hold a monopoly over regulating money now that cryptocurrencies, can be used without banks being involved at all. 

 

So, dazed and confused by so much change, you might marvel at the crazy new world you had woken into. But if you visit a school it will look so familiar and hardly changed at all. Of course there is much more hardware and software and a greater focus on equality but these are not big changes compared to those outside the classroom. In fact the actual system of education doesn’t look very different today than it did way back in the 1950s. Students move along in same age groups, fixed by blocks of time all trying to learn the same material in the same way at the same pace. Most will write in the same kind of exercise books and sit the same kind of exams in rooms and in rows that have hardly moved on at all. It is an industrial factory style model, sorting by testing and grading, filtering out more and more the older the students become. This seemed to work half a century ago when there were career ladders in trades and apprenticeships that provided meaningful alternatives for those who did not make it to the top of the school pile. Now despite the fact that many of these routes have gone much of the actual education, supposed to be there to help young people, remains the same.

 

When Covid-19 forced millions to stay at home for work or study we all looked to tech for the answers. Thailand is ahead of many countries in getting children back into schools but few would claim with any confidence that this pandemic is over anywhere in the world. Once airports open up fully and there are more international visitors Thailand’s school may have to close again. Who can tell? Rather than wringing our hands and wishing things were different, this is the best time to rethink what a school should look like and how it should operate. This can be the dawn of the new era for schools and the time for technology to be embraced in a profound, forward thinking way.     

 

The world’s big tech companies are already looking at this and investing heavily. They see a business opportunity as well as the chance to truly empower learning. The most advanced model has been developed by Microsoft and can be seen in its Showcase Schools, a new and growing initiative aimed at moving schools into the realm of high-tech, high-spec teaching and learning. If you ask as typical school if they have heard of Getting Smart, Gensler, Education Changemakers, Steelcase or Fielding Nair International they are unlikely to be familiar with them. Yet these are Microsoft’s collaborators in a radical rethink of what the classroom and the whole school could look like in the years ahead. They are pioneering new ideas, new approaches and new technology. Microsoft wants to offer an effective guide for education leaders to navigate the complexity of transforming schools. This is a holistic and systemic approach grounded in research from policy makers and academics around the world. It is about so much more than hardware.

 

Full Story: https://expatlifeinthailand.com/education/an-amazing-opportunity-to-reshape-education/

 

-- © Copyright Expat Life in Thailand 2021-05-26

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[wombat]

''An Amazing Opportunity"

thats what was said about giving women the vote and look where that has got us.

[Andycoops]

There is zero chance of reforming the Thai education system, as has been proven in the more than 10years I have been here.

Every couple of years a new education minister comes along and says the same thing about changing it which of course never happens as there are too many vested interests in the current status quo.