Changing the curriculum to fit the future

JORDAN MOSHE

Luis, the academic head of ADvTECH group, says there is a pressing need to examine the school curriculum and bring it up to date. ADvTECH is a leading private education provider, and has in its network 109 individual private schools, among them Crawford and Trinity House.

“The traditional model of education, which has served nations well since the 18th century is becoming increasingly obsolete,” he says. “Schools and universities have to understand the changing world, and must adapt and evolve in line with the shifts of the world of work.

“Teresa Carlson, Amazon Web Services vice-president, will argue that graduating students are not ready for employment, and finds her team having to administer formal training modules for new recruits. A completely different company and different industry, namely Landmark in Dubai, are putting their new recruits through formal training modules because they are not work-ready. It’s this alignment between education and the world of work that needs strengthening. Schools are being left to deal with the gaps on their own, and each school is trying to supplement an already full curriculum.”

Luis maintains that the matriculant of today is expected to be proficient in traditional subject skills and content, exemplifying such understanding in time-constrained exams written behind a desk. At the same time, they also they need to be proficient in a number of highly relevant global competencies such as social skills and the ability to negotiate and work in teams.

“Coding and programming don’t form part of the core curriculum as stipulated by the national education authorities, but students wanting to participate in the real world need to be proficient and literate in the world of digital technology. As a result, learning outcomes have increased, placing greater pressure on students today.

“They don’t need to be robots performing a well-defined set of instructions,” says Luis. “Instead, they have to be creators, innovators, and problem solvers. Today’s school curriculum needs to align with these modern-day skills.”

Lorraine Srage, the principal of King David Linksfield (KDL), says that many schools are beginning to realise that preparing their students for matric exams is not the same as empowering them to create productive, meaningful, and satisfying lives.

“King David aims to be globally relevant and recognise the need to go beyond the content of the curriculum beyond what it assumes students need to know towards grappling with how we know anything. We are now being challenged to enable students to become the producers of knowledge, not just consumers or reproducers.”

Like Luis, Srage believes that education needs to shift its focus from predetermined content to transferable skills that students can use to grapple with any content in any context.

“These are the skills that will be marketable in a future where machines are better at memorising content and implementing predetermined procedures than we are,” she says. “These are the skills that will be the most useful when working together to face the challenges facing our planet, enabling students to become agents of their own knowledge and participate actively in democratic processes.”

Central to this is curriculum change, KDL has piloted changes at Grade 8 and Grade 9 level, aiming to create a learning environment in which children can discover their true passions and develop the skills vital to an ever-changing world.

Says Srage, “The 21st century needs students who think creatively, innovatively, critically, and independently, so we aim to encourage children to take ownership of their own learning through the topics they are offered outside the core subjects. The electives on offer which cater for this need include photography, fusion cooking, robotics, sound and lighting, product revolution, trench warfare, dramatic arts, pottery, mega cities, and many more exciting topics.”

She believes that this curriculum will help students to begin their journey to global relevance and life-long learning, and stresses that it doesn’t interfere with core subjects such as English, Hebrew, Physical Science and Jewish Studies as these are incremental until matric.

Luis says that ADvTECH schools like Crawford offer students a curriculum which goes beyond expertise in subject content. Students are subjected to a rigorous global competencies curriculum which provides strategies for developing different skills in areas which encompass physical, social, and mental literacy. The curriculum includes digital literacy, featuring computational thinking (coding and programming) and building confidence in students with new-age technology such as robotics and drones.

“Students learn in ways that are more aligned to the way they will participate in the world outside of school,” he says. “This approach makes learning much more meaningful and purposeful.”

He concludes that education authorities and universities around the world need to find more progressive ways of checking for understanding and assessing students learning beyond the “sit-behind-the-desk-time-constrained” assessment which is a competency no longer sought after by the world of work.

“In my opinion, strong performance in a set of examinations correlates with strong performance at university, but doesn’t correlate with strong performance in the world outside of academic institutions,” says Luis. “Schools and universities need to evolve in line with the shifts of the world.”

“In a world that’s uncertain, we need to create stepping stones to be able to allow students to experiment, become risk takers, be flexible, be able to work collaboratively, be independent and be creative,” says Srage.