The 2056 school: knowledge management, nature and Socratic thinking

Dr Ray Daniels Clayton-Springvale-Westall Cluster, Springvale Secondary College Melbourne, Australia

The way our schools are in 2056 can be traced back to the transformational work we began in our city’s schools 50 years ago. Ours is a suburban city in Greater Melbourne, some distance from that Australian southern city’s CBD. Decade after decade in the second half the 20th century and the early decades of the 21st, our city was a magnet for each successive wave of migrants seeking a better life or fleeing wars or oppression in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.  

Across the planet at the start of the 21st century, there were so many conflicting ideas about how to improve schools it was easy to become lost in them. Dr. James Comer of the Yale School Development Program commented that school reformers were ‘like nineteenth-century medicine men … promoting everything whether there was any evidence that it works or not’.

In Victoria, schools were granted a great deal of freedom to choose their own innovative strategies. We took to heart James Comer’s message that, for a successful school to change, ‘we must base everything we do on what is known about how children and youths develop and learn’. We wanted sound theories and models on which to base our initiatives on behalf of the children, youth and families of our city.

We looked for approaches that were evidence-based, not unfounded fads. Whole brain thinking was a strategy we embraced wholeheartedly from the outset for its capacity to nudge students to greater creativity in everything they did. Another was accessing up to date knowledge about teaching and learning. Our growing understanding of the millennia of human development proved critical in more than one of the breakthroughs that empowered us to construct environments that allowed our students to overcome income, gender, ethnic, class and racial barriers. These were the blockers then to so many young people achieving high levels of development, education, intellectual growth and problem-solving capacity. All of these were needed to thrive in a knowledge economy. We added strategies as we found them to be useful and documented our progress so that our knowledge could be used and built on by others.

2056 would have seemed just a few decades too far in 2006. To imagine our school-metamorphosis, we looked ahead to 2020 and, through backward-mapping mind journeys, we envisioned a future school where the needs of students would be fully met and one that would prepare them to fully participate as citizens in a democratic learning society and to be effective contributors to a knowledge economy. 

Long before the new millennium, it was evident that learning technologies were going to feature prominently in our imagined future school. But in our city, we were always short of dollars to embrace the latest technology, which we knew would be obsolete before we had learned to use it well. However, we were proud of setting up computer pods adjacent to classrooms in 2000 and developing a policy that we would encourage our students to be discriminating users of the technology we could afford. Discriminating use involved thinking and was not the busy work on the internet with a worksheet in hand that would sometimes be mistaken for research back then.

As we expected, the cost of providing a digitally enriched learning environment kept falling so that now what was out of our financial reach in 2006 is as common as the chalk and slate and the Victorian School Readers were one hundred years ago.

Transform to survive

In 2056, there is still a place we call school. It was for a time under threat from home schooling, the promise of learning on-demand on the internet and the myth that anyone can teach.

Although rebuilding the status of the teaching profession helped, the school survived because the young needed it, and so did older people. We made our schools the heart of the community once more. We included the baby boomers in our schools to tap the knowledge of everyone in the community and meet the universal need of humankind to belong: ‘Homo sapiens is a social species. We play, work, interact, learn, and reproduce in social groups throughout our lives’ (Keating, 1998) and we fear loneliness.

Lifelong learning is no longer just an educator’s mantra; it is a core value of our community. From our network of schools’ database, people throughout our city are able to locate someone with knowledge or expertise on whatever they wish to learn.
 
Teaching is now among the most respected professions. Our teachers are expert in the sciences of child and adolescent development and learning (cognitive science). They are not embarrassed to use the language of these sciences that are foundational to their profession.

A model of teaching

The science and art of teaching became conceptualised as ‘guiding students to more competent learning performances … in meaningful contexts of use’ (Wilhelm et al.). Underpinning our teaching was a four-step process that could, depending on what was being taught, be shrunk to a 30-minute lesson or expanded to a day-long program or a year-long course.  

Teaching is for understanding

Because we always wanted to teach for understanding, we assumed that what is being taught has to be within the reach of the learner; otherwise what is being taught won’t be able to be grasped. The teacher provides the scaffolding to support the learner in this sociocultural theory of learning.

In Vygotskian terms, the learning task must be in the learner’s zone of proximal development (ZPD). For successful teaching, learning tasks need to be just ahead of the student’s current level of independent functioning, current interests, and present state of being. Of course, the teachers’ influence can develop new learner interests, teach learners new ways of doing things and even create new states of being in areas such as motivation, engagement, and persistence.

Personalising learning

Our model of teaching was the starting point for the journey to personalise learning for each and every student. Personalised learning was supported by a strong shift to teacher formative assessment and empowering students to undertake self and peer assessment. Students were trained to provide coaching and mentoring to each other. We taught children and adolescents how to learn, listened to them in focus groups and acted on the findings. These actions were crucial to gaining students’ support for the transformation of our schools. Students were provided with many choices within a coherent curriculum structure.

Before long, we found that David Miliband was correct, personalised learning is tailoring what we do to ‘the needs, interests and aptitudes’ of each unique individual and by doing so we did ‘raise quality and equity’ across our schools.

Redefining teacher work

Personalising learning was hard work and, to make way for it, some teacher work had to be jettisoned. While protecting their professional status, our teachers welcomed the assistance of numerous paraprofessionals who took care of all those tasks not related to the teachers’ specialist knowledge that used to take so much of the teachers’ time and energy 50 years ago.

Also, because they understand that in the learning society the school cannot do it alone; teachers provide basic training to our students and their parents, as well as to community members, in our network’s approach to teaching and learning. Students use this training to coach and mentor each other; parents to reinforce what their children learn at school and pass on their life’s lessons. Adult members of the community use it to teach others what they know about, ranging from improving a novice’s golf swing to the latest in nanotechnology. Volunteers from the community bring their knowledge and experience to school and work alongside our professional teachers. Some teach as oral historians, leading students to understand aspects of the Australian past from the perspective of, for example, a refugee from Sudan or a piece-work clothes maker from Vietnam. Others teach what they have learned about the cosmos or an ancient civilization. Particularly welcome are stories or anecdotes that provide the opportunity for students to frame philosophical questions and explore the meaning of concepts that are:

• Common (already familiar to students)
• Central (intrinsic to the making of meaning in the curriculum)
• Contestable (multiple answers are possible)
• Challenging (become meaningful via complex thought)
• Connected (relevant to aspects of everyone’s experience)

For example: What is happiness? What is the good life? Is this fair or just?  What is good leadership?

A learning environment rich in ICT, thinking and connected to the natural world

Our schools, as we expected in 2006, have an abundance of learning technologies but also are rich in thinking and in connection to nature. Classrooms became democratic communities of inquiry because we value student wonder and puzzlement, as well as thinking together to make progress in understanding. Now, being able to think Socratically is as important as becoming literate and numerate. All teachers model and explicitly teach thinking and questioning behaviours.

Nearly 50 years ago, our teachers noticed that it was the stimulus materials about the natural world that provoked the best quality student-led inquiry. The philosophical questions they asked about nature and how humankind relates to it were always fertile. The dialogues that followed were complex and richly textured. We also recalled the interest prompted in the Concept Game we devised about fairness to animals. We hypothesised that contact with nature would prompt wonder as much as philosophy did.

We conducted focus groups with our students and discovered that in our suburban schools, far from the ocean and mountains, our students felt starved of contact with the natural world, except for the few who were able to keep pets. One of us remembered how a student recently arrived in Australia responded to a day trip to Wilsons Promontory National Park with surprise and delight at his discovery that ‘The sea is salty, sir!’

We found support for our ideas in The last child in the woods, by Richard Louv, passionate in its advocacy of what he called the child-nature reunion. 

• The urge to affiliate with other forms of life is innate and needs to be accommodated in school life (p. 43).
• Classrooms should be designed to take advantage of the capacity of nature to improve physical and emotional health (p. 52).
• Exposure to nature reduces symptoms of ADHD and improves cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression (p. 34).
• Studies of children in schoolyards, with both green areas and manufactured play areas, in Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the USA found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas. Heightened fantasy and make-believe, greater sense of wonder, and more egalitarian play between boys and girls were found (p. 87).
• The growing body of evidence indicates that direct exposure to nature is essential for the physical and emotional health of children and adolescents (p. 34).
• The physical and emotional exercise enjoyed when playing in nature is more varied and less time-bound than organised sport with benefits for combating obesity (p. 47).
• The protective impact of nearby nature is strongest for the most vulnerable young people – those experiencing the highest levels of stressful life events (p. 49).

So we began our tentative steps to bring about a deep reunion with nature for all of our students by establishing school gardens, strengthening or reinstating nature study as a part of the curriculum and seeking funds to introduce outdoor education for all. This small beginning was the flapping of the butterfly’s wings that culminated in the way the new schools were designed in 2025. That was the year when all the schools built between 1955 and 1985 were demolished and rebuilt. University research, which showed our zoos met the needs of their animals better than our schools met the needs of students, led to so much community outrage that the government had to reduce every one of those dilapidated factory-age buildings to rubble.

In our post-2025 schools, there was not one of Gardner’s multiple-intelligences held in higher esteem than the ‘naturalist intelligence’, one of those he added to his original list of seven. Now, all our city’s schools have spaces for the young to explore and interact with plants and animals, and for natural play and for meditation. The most fortunate have enough open space for those who wish to run freely for an hour to do so. They mentally return to the African savannah, where long, slow distance running may have played a critical role in making us human two million or so years ago, as Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman argued in 2004.

Over time, the reunion with nature made the difference in beating the obesity and depression epidemics and promoting the stewardship needed to sustain our planet, without causing young people to fear and loathe technology and modernity.

From then (2006) to now (2056)

For clarification, let’s push the rewind button and re-visit the steps that led us to the 2056 school.

The Thinking Curriculum: 2004 – 2007

From 2004 to 2007, our teachers worked together on whole brain teaching and learning, web quests and ICT, philosophy in schools, visual literacy, Habits of Mind, Brain Gym and boys’ education. In the last two years, we referred often to Accelerated learning by Alistair Smith, Mark Lovatt and Derek Wise to integrate many of these strategies.

Peer coaching for teachers

In 2006, we launched peer coaching for teachers with a program we called Learning Partners: powerful peer coaching. Our model is based on the expectation that all teachers and leaders participate in phase 1 (peer watching) and phase 2 (peer feedback). For phase 3, we trained approximately 20% of the members of our project as coaches, so that they were skilled in offering possibilities and suggestions for improvement. It was powerful because it supported teachers in introducing new skills to the classroom and solving problems they identified. Learning Partners is a non-hierarchical, reflective model of coaching in which the teacher retains the power and where flatter is better, as was the case in much of organisational life by then.

Knowledge management

Knowledge Management is ‘an approach that enables people within an organization to develop a set of practices to collect information and share what they know, leading to action that improves services and outcomes … bringing together … people, processes, and technologies to enable the organization to share information more effectively’ (Petrides, L.A. & Nodine, T.R. 2003, pp. 10-11).

Once the Learning Partners’ vision that everyone is coached, everyone coaches, became a reality, it was time to provide resources for occasions when the learning partners wanted to access knowledge or skills beyond their own. It was then that we reconceptualised Learning Partners as part of a larger concept, Knowledge Management. We then created a new program, F2F Knowledge Partners.  

F2F Knowledge Partners

As with Learning Partners, an essential component of F2F Knowledge Partners was face-to-face communication. While explicit knowledge can be documented, stored and accessed in an electronic database, implicit and tacit knowledge needs to be shared in person. Opportunities were provided for all members of our project to verbalise and pool their tacit, implicit or craft knowledge in conversations about their work. Qualitative research techniques were used to record these data.

Knowledge audit

Across the schools, we audited two aspects of our work:

• the staff’s professional pedagogical knowledge
• the internal and external, formal and informal networks to which staff members belonged.

From the audit, we were able to identify our core knowledge: what is known about teaching and learning. More specifically:

• Who knows what.
• What we do not know.
• What we need to know.

Then we were in a much better position to manage knowledge by:

• discarding obsolete knowledge
• sharing knowledge
• integrating new with prior and tacit knowledge in ways that work in context.

Our Learning Partners and F2F Knowledge Partners allowed all our teachers and leaders to model lifelong learning and how to learn for their students and community.

Creating the databases

We formed a partnership with a university provider to set up our databases and then held a launch of F2F Knowledge Partners to familiarise all members of our project with the richness and depth of the knowledge we had on tap among us. We were now on the way to learning ‘how to use to the full the intellectual capital trapped in the heads of (our project) members’ (Professor David Hargreaves).

Next, we audited the knowledge across the community on all manner of topics to create a database to both strengthen our school-community knowledge-links and those among all members of the community.

What has been gained for teachers?

Without the expectation that everyone participated in Learning Partners, the opportunities for reflection that we built into the routine of our schools through peer coachingand F2F Knowledge Partners, and the re-definition of teachers’ work, the daily unrelenting demands of school life would have stymied our metamorphosis. Our teachers and leaders would have continued to feel like a tennis shoe in a clothes dryer, Roland S. Barth’s simile for the life of school people, ‘congested, convoluted, lumpy, dark, endless’. Fifty years ago, most teachers’ knee-jerk response to any new idea was ‘Where will I find the time for that?’ Of course, the busyness of school life abides, but we now have strong evidence that there are ways to work together that mean the old 20th century maxim, ‘Work smarter, not harder’, has become a reality.

To boot, teachers are delighted that our data on student performance against local and international standards have risen year by year. In our hometown we are challenging schools located in much more privileged socioeconomic neighbourhoods.

What has been gained for students?

Students love the mindful and natural environment we provide for learning. With plentiful learning technologies and an array of stimuli for philosophy in digital form, as well as in print, the relationship of our classrooms to the natural world is just as it is described in Richard Louv’s in Last child in the woods, by an engineer who became a high school maths teacher. Louv captures the capacity for wonder and wondering that nature and Socratic thinking have in common:

‘I imagine a classroom that turns outward, both figuratively and literally. The grounds would become a classroom, buildings would look outward, and gardens would cover the campus. The world of naturalists would be the vehicle by which we would teach reading and writing. Math and science would be taught as a way to understand the intricacies of nature, the potential to meet human needs, and how all things are interlaced. A well-rounded education would mean learning the basics, to become a part of society that cherished nature while at the same time contributing to the well-being of humankind. Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of the ecosystem, and potential for healing?’

Yes, we certainly can – and do.

References

Bath, RS. Learning by heart. 2004.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Centre for Educational Research and Innovations. Knowledge management in the learning society. 2000. Paris: OECD.
Keating, DP. ‘Human Development in the Learning Society’ in Hargreaves, A, Lieberman, A, Fullan, M & Hopkins, D. International handbook of educational change. 1998. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Louv, R. Last child in the woods: saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. 2005.North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Wilhelm, J, Baker, T & Dube, J. Strategic reading: guiding students to lifelong literacy. 2001. New Hampshire: Heinemann.