Reflection: The Larger Context
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to find a theme more useful, and with more practical insights to significantly improve the quality of education in classrooms, than the theme that guides this issue, a theme that looks at learning, teaching, and leadership as interacting dimensions in an integrated framework. This issue contains insights from experiences and theoretical analyses from countries of different continents around the world, and is remarkable for its great diversity and breadth, and for the confluence of major common ideas and approaches that govern good practice in different settings. Although the project titles and the labels for the conceptual approaches may differ-from shared leadership to student-centeredness, to reflective management, to empowerment through decentralization, to organizational learning-the underlying philosophy and implied practices provide teachers and school heads with the tools to improve leadership and teaching. The result is the power to unleash the potentials of students and teachers alike, in an atmosphere of creativity, enthusiasm, teamwork, innovation, and a dedication to improve and succeed.
It follows, of course, that as teaching and leadership are imbued with these principles and practices, a quantum leap in learning will take place. For after all, in the triangle reprensented by learning, teaching, and leading, it is clearly learning that is at the apex, with the teaching and leading as the support base intended to effect change in learning. The core purpose of education is not teaching or leading, but learning, and the goal of the support functions is to ensure that the needs of the individual learner are met.
In this connection, there is one particular thought about the learner that is implied and sometimes explicitly referred to in the articles, particularly in the guest editor's introduction. This thought calls for further reflection: the learner of today has fundamentally changed, as has his or her environment. These changes will continue and accelerate. The implication is that learning needs are also changing rapidly and will continue to do so.
Much of the discourse in this issue, and in education reform in general, focuses on the how -how to improve teaching and leading to improve learning. There is no lack of literature on how to improve classroom management, how to involve students more actively, how to team-teach, how to handle multigrade classes, and so on. And yet, despite the fact that the learner and his or her environment are changing so rapidly and creating new learning needs, not enough attention has really been given to the what -what learning needs ought to be met?
One instinctively feels that the what is the area of curriculum reform, and, indeed, in a limited way it is. But unfortunately, the masters of curriculum reform bring their experience and academic frameworks to the task at hand, often expending efforts in minor modification or resequencing of content matter (better ways to teach factoring in algebra, new methods of instilling poetry appreciation, etc.) rather then rethinking whether, in fact, large chunks of their academic expertise continue to be needed at all or need to be replaced by new and different nontraditional subject matter. The assumption is that the future will be a continuation of the past, and fine-tuning is all that is needed. Nothing could be more dangerously wrong. Reform has often been a case of putting old wine into new bottles, when the times call for an entirely different beverage.
What is it then about the new learner and his or her environment that warrants no only curriculum reform, but a radical reinvention of the curriculum? Reading between the lines of the previous articles provides much of the answer. There is enough research in the neurosciences that tells one how the brain learns, and how the brain of today's student, conditioned by media, information technology, and a market society's instantaneous gratification, works in ways different from those of past generations. It is a brain that relies on images more than on the printed word, that absorbs by some gestalt intuition rather than by logical and sequential induction, that works in quick spurts rather than through sustained attention-unlike the brain of student's predecessors and even their teachers.
It is more interesting that the present and future environment of the learner has changed dramatically. Enough has been said about the information and technical world now taken so much for granted in other sectors of society. But the one feature of that environment that the articles of this issue have brought out very clearly is the inevitable trend toward multicultural and multiethnic societies and communities, not only on the multinational or global scale, but even in small towns, groups, and societies once as homogenous as those in Iceland and Japan . In the last two cases, it is no longer unusual to have a representation of different languages, cultures, and races (and therefore different learning needs) in a single classroom-something quite unusual not too long ago. And as today's students move from the school to the workplace, they will continue to find themselves in multicultural groups and communities, even in areas that have traditionally been quite homogenous. To what extent has today's curriculum been changed to meet this reality? Do teachers still depend more time on the intricacies of sine, cosine, and tangent than on providing an understanding of the basic tenets of the Islamic faith, for example? And which is more important for the student in the long run?
The guest editor has referred to the work of the Delors Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century, in which there is a timely reminder that education is not just a matter of information transmission or even of skills development. Beyond learning to know and learning to do, education for the future must rest on two other pillars: learning to be and learning to live together. A secure sense of self-esteem and cultural identity that is accepting of others-along with an ability to develop societies of tolerance, peace, and harmony-are goals that are inadequately striven for in a curriculum that is 95% information driven. And yet society's failures are not in knowledge or science; they are in humanity's inability to live harmoniously on this planet. The guest editor has pointed out the need "to teach not only for the knowledge society but beyond it."
It is clear that establishing the balance among the four Delors pillars in an education curriculum can never be achieved by curriculum reform in the traditional sense, which continues to hold academic subject delineations as sacred and merely works around content it has always been comfortable with. And yet radical findings from research and pilot projects are now challenging premises that have always been taken for granted. One experiment, for example, completely deleted arithmetic in the first 5 years of schooling to devote time to societal issues, yet when children in this experiment completed 1 year of math at the sixth-grade level, their achievements tests in math were equivalent to those who had spent 6 years studying math. In another example, out-of-school female adolescents in a live-in learning camp managed within 6 months to learn enough to pass qualifying exams allowing them to enter the fifth grade of regular public schooling.
It is, perhaps, beyond the scope of this article, and of this issue, to elaborate on the possibilities of radically new approaches to designing learning content. But it does not diminish the realization that indeed new paradigms of education are called for. Fine-tuning is not the answer.
A few analogies may be helpful. The need for faster transportation over longer distances was not met by building a better car, but by inventing the airplane. It was not met by improving the car's engine or its comfort or its range. It was met by a new paradigm. The new vehicle had some features in common with the old one: it had passenger seats, a driver or a pilot, and it moved at great speed, but the operating principles were completely different, opening up possibilities unknown at the time. Similarly, producing the written word was not improved by improving the typewriter, but by developing word processing in a computer. Again there were similarities in the instrument: both had keyboards and produced printed pages. But the enormous leap in capacity and flexibility was only possible with the entirely different set of operating premises and technologies. The time has come for educational leaders to stop trying to improve the education car or typewriter and invent the airplane or the laptop computer (or the submarine, or the bicycle, or the desert camel cart, or whatever the particular fast-changing education needs of the community require). The new paradigm with its new content will, in turn, suggest new methodologies best suited for it. As we redesign the what , we will have to rethink the how
And this is where we come full circle. On the one hand, redesigning the what and the how are not sequential but simultaneously efforts. In fact, an effective application of many of the ideas in this issue regarding the how (improving teaching and leading) logically lead to team thinking, innovation, and inevitably creative innovation-sometimes sowing the seeds of new paradigms. As these new paradigms for an educational content that truly meets the learner's future learning needs take shape, the management, delivery, and effective use of these paradigms will depend once again on how effective leadership and effective teaching, so well illuminated in this issue, can make learning all it should be.
