WHERE ARE WE GOING AND WHY!

"The Fourth Way of educational reform heralds the next stage for educational improvement – a movement which reverts educational authority back from centralized bureaucracies to educators and communities, diversifies skills and content taught to suit each community and context, and is driven by the inspiring and also basic belief that there are skills and aptitudes that are just as critical as content knowledge. The Fourth Way pushes beyond standardization, data-driven decision making, and target-obsessed distractions to forge an equal and interactive partnership among the people, the profession, and their government.

Many countries are [still] focusing attention on additional accountability, school choice and competition, short-term outcomes, and data-driven decision-making (what have been called the Second and Third Ways). Many high performing countries and systems, however, are reexamining [or have already reexamined] their structures and policies to move towards greater collective professional autonomy from bureaucratic control, stronger active involvement of local communities and diversified teaching to respond to today’s widely varying populations of learners.

This Fourth Way of educational reform heralds the next stage for educational improvement – a movement which reverts educational authority back from centralized bureaucracies to educators and communities, diversifies skills and content taught to suit each community and context, and is driven by the inspiring and also basic belief that there are skills and aptitudes that are just as critical as content knowledge.

The region that is widely touted to be the economic powerhouse of this century – Asia – has already begun to actively reinvent its educational systems around educational innovation, school designed curriculum, and intelligent uses of technology: when traditional bureaucracies want to do no more than raise the bar in basic achievement, centralize and standardize the core curriculum, and introduce technology in a fast and faddish hurry.

What the US [and the UK] devalues or dismisses as soft skills, are, for overseas competitors, the hard-edge entrepreneurial essentials of 21st century success. Schools and other educational institutions should cultivate attitudes, cultures, and skills needed within creative and collaborative learning environments.

Creativity will not flourish and be sustained in schools unless people feel secure to take risks and explore the unknown. Moreover, working with and understanding innovation requires creative and risk-intensive contexts.

Unfortunately the increased emphasis upon academic success – typically around just language arts and mathematics – is having a regrettable ripple effect: an unwavering emphasis on content; a subsequent reduction in time, effort and resources to areas outside this narrow subject matter; and an unspoken refocus on why we teach and what is considered important in education.

Punitive measures to enforce these directives only quicken the shift towards the standardized basics that high performing systems have moved far beyond.

When we commit to educating whole children within the context of whole communities and whole schools, we commit to designing learning environments that weave together the threads that connect not only math, science, the arts, and humanities, but also mind, heart, body, and spirit—connections that tend to be fragmented in our current approach.

What we are seeing as we view the strides taken by Singapore (Teach Less, Learn More); Canada (Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec); and of course Finland, is a growing and successful emphasis on teaching the Whole Child; developing the social, interactive and collaborative skills needed; and empowering teachers and students in their own learning. We are witnessing high performing educational systems and approaches that are moving towards the Fourth Way, at the very same time as policy makers in the US and elsewhere (the ones whom Sahlberg describes as advancing the Global Education Reform Movement – or GERM) are persistently and perhaps even deliberately being blinkered to these truths.

How can we respond to the diverse needs of local communities, if more and more of our attention is geared towards what is central and what is core? How can we embrace true innovation in children’s learning, if the system is endlessly persevrating on making marginal improvements on what already exists?

Children need literacy and math, but emotionally and intellectually, they need so much else as well. The old ways of change are being abandoned by our peers and our competitors. There is a new way, a fourth way of change, that can inspire our teachers, engage our communities, and lift up all of our children via a more holistic approach."