#GELPedu - The Shared Responsibility of Learning with Charles Leadbetter

Leadbetter opened by talking about his paper that addressed Personalised Learning in 2004, which at the time was challenged and picked and apart - it is heartening that the discourse around personalised learning is so strong now.  

There's enormous agreement about where we are at and what we need to do. Now we need to move on. The system that we have inherited is running into the sand. There is a sense that we want different things. We need to do something different to do something better. 

But education is gripped by a cartel of fear. 

Even when we praise the new we are holding on to the old models. Pisa is measuring measuring success of a an old model. 

Making change is the blue arrow and often feels tumultuous. 

There is a universal dialogue about competencies and fluencies needed for the 21C Learner.

What do we need to learning why?

How do we do it systematically? 

Where does it happen and who's involved?

He then used the analogy of self checkout at the grocery store. The first few times is a struggle, but he is determined to show his independence. Then as he is masters it, he realises that he has been duped into being a checkout operator. Ultimately we are moving to to more and more being automated. We are all going to have to question what roles we will maintain as humans. We will have to question what our roles will actually be. 

In many ways education equates to a 12 year training programme to become a not very good robot. 

We need to be focusing on:
Problem solving

Opportunity seeking

Creating value and meaning

Purpose led collaborative agency

How do you achieve stuff that matters? With other people to live well as a human in a fragile age. 

Charles Leadbetter sums up the competencies needed as:

Knowing

Questioning

Communicating

Collaborating 

Making 

Persistence 

Purpose breeds capability. If education has a purpose and is going somewhere, then capability will come.

Passion is great, but it shouldn't stop at what you think should want to be. Passion should: excite, be diverse, test, stretch, deepen and should be open.

He posed four sets of questions:

Assessment: How do we assess it? Do we need to assess it?

Practice: How do we prepare people for doing this?

Policy: what's the enabling framework?

Framing: what language do we use? What do we call it?

If we call ourselves innovative, alternative, 21 century etc - we are in danger of being interesting but marginal.