If our grandparents were to enroll in college today, they would suffer severe culture shock. Classrooms have changed drastically not only in the past decade but even in the past five years.
Culture shock The culture in Stoy — a school of only seven total classes — has completely changed since iPads took over the classrooms three years ago, Principal Chuck Warfield said. Trump’s rhetoric has changed the way hundreds of kids are bullied in classrooms This story has been optimized for offline reading on our apps. For a richer experience, you can find the full.
Many things have changed over the past 15 years. Classrooms that once had few if any English language learners in their student mix now teach students from many parts of the globe. Whereas in 1999, there was precious little classroom technology available for teachers and students, now technology routinely opens classrooms to the world and to a world of ways to think about teaching and learning.
Smart boards, laptops, and digital devices now dominate the classroom landscape. The growing skills gap is also forcing more working professionals to explore education as demand for untraditional skills is growing. This has also changed the face of contemporary student demographics.
Advances in artificial intelligence, digitalization, and technology have also forced many adults in the workforce to rethink their careers as the job market evolves and their roles are no longer needed. Many have also watched their roles quickly transform, requiring a whole new set of soft skills. These situations have helped welcome fast-paced learning with highly specialized topics into the fold, such as online courses and microlearning.
Now, there are older students on campus, with a growing number of part-time learners joining the ranks. Let's take a closer look at how these influences have changed students through the decades.
Profile and Mindset
Even in recent years, there have been some interesting changes to the expected student demographic. According to EAB, there is a growing trend towards 'non-traditional' characteristics with one of the most noticeable changes being age.
Game Suggestions Shooting RPG Ragdoll Action Fighting Puzzle Strategy Sports Super Smash Flash 9 Sandbox Game. Plazma Burst is an amusing platform game that you can enjoy here in your browser. The game is available as an unblocked game. This game has received 459,828 plays and has received a rating of 9.1 out of 10 with 4,861 votes. This fun shooting game uses Flash technology to run in most browsers. Plasma burst potato games online.
The standard profile for college students was recent graduates of high school in the 18 to 21 age group. Today, 1 in 5 students are over 30, and 38% of undergraduates are over 25. Another non-traditional trait is that 35% of students attending college are doing so on a part-time basis and 2 in 5 attend community college.
In addition, the amount of information students are forced to absorb today is also leaving students feeling overwhelmed. Part of this is due to technology, which at face value would appear to offer easier access to research.
However, students don’t know how to access it effectively and also have trouble retaining it. Those of lower incomes are at higher risk for information overload.
Flexible Learning
Not surprisingly, the added pressure of balancing work and school has increased the demand for flexible learning options.
According to EAB, over 25% of students have chosen online courses due to their flexibility. Online learning trends include:
- App-based learning
- Microlearning
- Learning Videos
- Mobile Learning
- Gamification
- Virtual and Augmented Reality
Collaborative degree programs are also changing the way people get their diplomas and degrees.
They offer students the option to combine community college with a partnering university to earn credentials. This allows them to use different institutions to obtain a degree at their chosen 'home' institution.
Microlearning and Video
eLearning Industry reported that microlearning accounted for over 60% of learning last year. This approach provides bite-sized learning modules to take in the information that is most important.
This is probably because just 1% of a typical work week is available for people in the workforce for training and development - 24 minutes out of a typical work week.
Microlearning uses 10 to 12-minute videos in hand with interactive tests to allow students to grasp basic information quickly.
For corporate training there are now many video learning platforms available making it an easy and affordable choice to try to close the skills gap which can be adapted and customized to meet a specific learning plan.
Digital Devices and Technology
Digital devices are used in every aspect of life and provide a mobile, interactive tool for learning. Educators are finding ways to use them effectively, including the nuances and process of social channels.
Digital devices also allow students to be more mobile instead of being chained to a desk. Interactive communication such as Skype can also be used for new learning experiences that are shared with other classrooms. This allows for collaboration for projects between classes and even school-to-school introducing experiential learning in many communities.
Technology and digital devices have also made teachers more accessible to students using educational platforms, social media and other means to communicate, upload lessons and assignments, and for assignment submissions. At the same time, many fear that artificial intelligence is the sleeping giant that can replace a teacher with many adaptive software developments opening up various possibilities.
Schools are using the internet as a learning tool with many focusing on IT skills. While many have smart boards in every classroom and students carry around laptops to their lectures.
Student Equity and Identity
Equity is tearing down the walls of systemic policies that have held many students back.
Some good examples include the Global Women’s March, Occupy Wall Street Movement, Black Lives Matter, and gender-based rights groups who all are instigating change to create a more tolerant classroom. This also forces teachers to become advocates for students as technology breaks down barriers and shows students the struggles of others.
Individuality is encouraged, something unheard of even 10 years ago. Collaborative projects force different people together to foster tolerance and understanding with more focus on teamwork. Students are also encouraged to be more expressive in their work; something strangely frowned upon in times past.
Critical Thinking Skills
This same approach to group learning also provides a more hands-on environment that can provide students with real life skills that are becoming more important.
These skills will help them in changing roles in the workforce that emphasize the human side and critical thinking that cannot be achieved by technology.
Learning is no longer passive and instead has moved away from the repetitive practices used to force students to absorb information. This approach stifles human development and avoids teaching students the importance of critical thinking.
Student Debt
There has been an increase in student borrowing which in the past ten years has witnessed the following trends:
- 60% of all graduates borrowed for education in 2008 compared to 52% in 1996
- Of those borrowers, the average loan was over $23K for a bachelor’s degree compared to just above $17K in 1996
- Borrowing rates are highest at private for-profit schools, and more students are attending these schools
- 24% of bachelor’s degree graduates at for-profit schools borrowed over $40K compared to 14% at not-for-profit schools
How Little Classrooms Have Changed Password
Interestingly, 47% of students in 2017 were financially independent of their parents, while 42% were living near or below poverty according to the Lumina Foundation.
How Little Classrooms Have Changed Children
Adding to finances circling the students of today, San Diego State University researchers found that who studied students from 1971 to 2014 found that about 71% of millennials felt making money was important, compared to 55% of boomers. Millennials also regard their BA as the 'new high school diploma,' feeling it would not help them build financial security.
Students Then and Now
All this information is well and good, but nothing is more revealing than a side by side demographic comparison. Comparing millennials to the silent generation based on education discovered the following:
- Millennial women were four times more likely than the silent generation to have the minimum of a bachelor’s degree by the same age
- 3 out of 10 millennial men had at least a bachelor’s degree while only 15% of their silent counterparts did.
- More millennial women have a bachelor’s degree than their male counterparts which is the opposite of the silent generation
Close to a decade ago there were still noted differences between the students of today and those 10 years back.
A Pew Research study found that according to college presidents surveyed, students in 2011 were not as prepared for college as students 10 years prior. In fact, 58% of college presidents said that the high school students of 2011 were less prepared than those who arrived the decade before. In comparison, 6% said high schools had improved in student preparation, and 36% said they were doing the same as they did 10 years ago.
Final thoughts
These profound changes show a distinct shift from the paradigms of an outdated past.
Women are out-educating men, adults are returning to and continuing their education, and the digital age is introducing openmindedness and a new way for people to learn.
How Little Classrooms Have Changed Everything
Is your institution prepared to compete in this new digital world?
Black History Matters: Changing what happens in our Classrooms- Part 11/12/2020 I’m not going to spend time explaining why we need to teach Black British History. Or bemoaning how little of it is currently taught. That has been done repeatedly, eloquently and shockingly, not least in a series of as yet unacted on government recommendations. Though I will just quote W.E.B. DuBois’s warning of how easy it is ‘by emphasis and omission to make children believe… that every great thought was a white man’s thought’ and ‘every great deed…a white man’s deed’, and draw your attention to this brilliant spoken word performance by Samuel King which also puts the point across very powerfully: What I want to contribute to the conversation is a list of 19 specific ideas that I have picked up from many conversations over the years as to how we can change things, NOW. Because solutions, not problems, are the agents of change. Since I first began drafting this list in July progress in some of these areas have been accelerating, and so I will also be signposting existing initiatives in the relevant areas. However, I am not privy to all of these, so please add things I’ve missed in the comments and I’ll incorporate them. Click here to skip straight to the ideas. It seems clear to me that the current Government is not going to be part of the solution anytime soon. The Petitions Committee are currently conducting a listening exercise in response to the fact that 268,182 people have signed a petition to Teach Britain's colonial past as part of the UK's compulsory curriculum created by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson of Impact of Omission; whilst two other petitions, Add education on diversity and racism to all school curriculums and Making the UK education curriculum more inclusive of BAME history, have received 115,575 signatures combined. While the evidence (watch the 5th November session here; the 18th November session here) makes for illuminating listening, if the 20th October debate on the subject (text from Hansard here) is anything to go by, we have a long struggle ahead if we are to convince the current Government to change the curriculum. The Minister for Equalities herself asserted that the curriculum does not need to change, and that while children ‘can learn about the British empire and colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition, and how our history has been shaped by people of all ethnicities…we should not apologise for the fact that British children primarily study the history of these islands.’ This elides the fact that there have been ‘people of all ethnicities’ in ‘these islands’ since at least the Roman period; that Black History is British History, and extends far beyond the narrative of enslavement and colonialism. As I told the Department for Education back in 2012, the Edwardian ‘Our Island Story’ narrative is no longer fit for purpose. But, our Government believe the curriculum is already ‘incredibly diverse’. It is revealing that Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has tweeted approvingly about the frankly worrying right-wing think tank Policy Exchange’s History Matters project, which, concerned that British History is becoming ‘politicised, and sometimes distorted, in the current moment’, are compiling a dossier to record the changes being made, they suggest, ‘without proper thought and against public opinion’. And Saturday’s Daily Express summed up Williamson’s stance, and that of the ‘Common Sense’ group of Tory MPs, under the headline: We will NOT bow to the PC brigade! PM rejects calls for 'woke' school curriculum. While the fight for curriculum change must of course continue, I for one, am far too impatient to wait for this Government to have a change of heart and make teaching Black British History mandatory. Neither is change going to happen organically, ‘as university curriculums evolve’ as a overly-optimistic article in the Economist this summer suggested. As the Royal Historical Society’s 2018 Race, Ethnicity and Equality Report highlighted, universities have their own problems including a lack of diversity in both the curriculum and the teaching staff. Further, a damning set of recommendations released in November 2020 by Universities UK concluded that British higher education perpetuates institutional racism. And the pace of change would be far too slow. I don’t want to wait for another generation of teachers to become, as the Economist suggested, ‘comfortable talking about topics they themselves were taught.’ Before we decide on a future strategy, it is important to recognize the many individuals, groups and organizations who have been campaigning for this vital change, and providing extra-curricular education for children since before the first National Curriculum was written in 1988. A history lesson on the campaign to change history lessons, if you will. Taking a longer view allows us to learn from the victories and defeats along the way. The establishment of Black History Month in 1987 was a step towards highlighting this history in schools. In 1991 Peter Fryer, author of the seminal Staying Power:The History of Black People in Britain (1984), complained alongside Julia Bush, in a pamphlet on ‘The Politics of Black History’ that ‘the intentions of this government are to ram a nationalistic, narrow, stereotype down children’s throats’, which sounds strikingly familiar. The Black and Asian Studies Association (BASA), founded in 1991, petitioned the National Curriculum Council, Educational Publishers, and Ofsted throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and submitted detailed feedback during the curriculum consultation period in 2013. BASA member and history teacher Martin Spafford helped design the 2007 History National Curriculum which recommended the teaching of the continued ethnic diversity of the people of Britain throughout history, precolonial African civilisations, empire and decolonization, but sadly this progress was arrested in 2013. It’s also worth going back to listen to the various public discussion of the subject held over the last few years. Since 2014, education has been a recurrent theme at the What’s Happening in Black British History? workshops I run with Michael Ohajuru at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. In 2015 Hakim Adi held the History Matters conference highlighting the alarmingly low numbers of Black history students and teachers, which is now being combatted by the inspirational Young Historians Project. There have also been excellent discussions on the Justice2History podcast, at the 2018 Institute of Historical Research event ‘Where do we fit in?’ Black and Asian British History on the Curriculum, and at the new Institute of Historical Research Black British History Seminar in October. To succeed, we must combine the passion and energy of young campaigners such as the Black Curriculum, Fill in the Blanks and Impact of Omission, and a new cohort of innovative young history teachers with the experience and wisdom of stalwarts including BASA veterans Marika Sherwood, Hakim Adi, Stephen Bourne, Sean Creighton; campaigners like Arthur Torrington, co-founder of the Equiano Society and the Windrush Foundation; Angelina Osborne and Patrick Vernon, who have developed the 100 Great Black Britons project from a poll in 2003 to a nice fat book, out this year; history teachers like Martin Spafford, Nick Dennis and Dan Lyndon (who started his BlackHistory4Schools website back in 2006, and has recently written Colonial Countryside Project teaching materials); and those who train teachers and act as educational consultants like Justice2History’s Adbullah Mohamud and Robin Whitburn of UCL’s Institute of Education, Jason Todd at Oxford’s Education Department, Will Bailey-Watson in Reading; Black History Studies; Robin Walker (who co-wrote Black British History: Black Influences on British Culture (1948 to 2016) with the requirements of the current National Curriculum in mind); the Thinking Black educational project, the Windrush Foundation; the Equiano Society, BTWSC/AHR/BBM/BMC and Black History Walks, to name a few. It is also vital to include teachers and educational specialists (Mohamud and Whitburn’s ‘choreographers’) themselves in the conversation alongside ‘pugilists’(activists/campaigners) and ‘diggers’(historians): we cannot change anything without considering the many constraints placed upon our teachers and a detailed knowledge of how our schools actually operate. This oversight is nowhere more apparent than in the exclusive focus on curriculum change. Nearly a third of publicly-funded schools in England are now ‘academies’ (22 per cent of primary and 68 per cent of secondary schools), which no longer have to follow the curriculum (though many still do). Schools are also still implementing a vast array of changes imposed upon them over the last few years, including the 2019 Ofsted regulations, not to mention the unprecedented challenges of operating during a pandemic. While curriculum change should continue to be a goal, I fear that demanding this happen under the present Government will only lead to heads bloodied from repeated impact with the proverbial brick wall. With this in mind, we need to be inventive, and attack the problem from all conceivable angles. Go to my next blog to find my running list of proactive ideas to change what happens in our classrooms, besides maintaining the pressure on the Government to change the National Curriculum. This blog is the result of many conversations over several years, made urgent once more by the events of this year. These have at times been hard to keep up with, so if I’ve missed anything, please let me know in the comments and I’ll add/edit accordingly. I would particularly like to thank the following people for their input and feedback on this blog, while emphasising that any errors remain my own: Shahmima Akhtar, Kerry Apps, Sean Creighton, Hannah Elias, Corinne Fowler, Tim Jenner, Abdul Mohamud, Michael Ohajuru, Helen Sanson, Martin Spafford and Robin Whitburn. 1/12/2020 10:43:49 pm There is the freedom for us as history teachers to deliver a diverse curriculum. As part of the 2007 review I worked on a scheme of work for the HA looking at the concept of Britishness/Englishness and how it's very real meaning has constantly changed over 2000 years. There was much good work done by ILEA and as a result by the early 90s in many London schools black British history was taught. The National Curriculum and the text books that came with it restricted this but there were still opportunities. When we were able to teach 25% of the GCSE as coursework, my Deptford school used it to study change over time in our community, which became a study of post ww2 migration and its impact. The second piece was on the New Cross Fire and Black People's Day of Action. Gove's changes, which included abolishing coursework, were really detrimental, but also education publishing and exam boards need to keep up. I gave a talk to Edexcel staff in 2007 (!) during black history month on the black British presence from Roman times, but it was for interested staff, and I fear that those that came did not have the power to change things. Here's hoping that the activism of this year , results in changes in the classroom. Thank you for your excellent work. 2/12/2020 01:40:26 am BASA veterans should also include Stephen Bourne author of Black Poppies 2/12/2020 07:56:25 am Dear Stephen, have now edited accordingly and added further references to your work in Part 2 as well. Yours apologetically, Miranda 3/12/2020 04:50:31 am I am a primary school teacher in London and lead humanities. The primary curriculum is very malleable. There are only a few mandatory topics, there is a lot of freedom it's just that people teach what they know and have resources on. Leave a Reply. |