As your students and you begin a new school year, here’s a question for you to ponder:
What’s worth learning?
Alabama’s College and Career-Ready Standards provide a road map to help you answer that question. The standards challenge teachers and students alike to focus on deeper learning. But, with so many topics, areas, concepts, themes, where should you focus? What are the most important things for children to learn?
This question – what’s worth learning? – lies at the heart of many of my favorite education books, including the just-published Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World (Jossey-Bass/Wiley), written by David Perkins, a senior research professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Making Learning Whole (2010).
Perkins, who is senior co-director of Harvard’s famous Project Zero, begins with an all too familiar story that many teachers experience regularly. A student raises his or her hand and asks: “Why do we need to know this?”
Perkins says the question is one of his least favorites – in fact, he calls it an “uppity question” – and acknowledges that it’s often hard to come up with a good and pithy answer. “Because it’s part of the unit goals,” or “Because you’ll need it for the test,” or “Because you’ll need to know it next year” really aren’t satisfactory.
Perkins contends that the question, however uppity, is a good one. In fact, he argues that it is an “uppity version of one of the most important questions in education, a question with only three words: What’s worth learning in school.” (p. 2)
As Perkins goes on to weave his tapestry of thoughts about this important question, he coins two phrases used throughout the book: “lifeworthy learning” and “lifeready learning.”
Learning for life
When Perkins speaks of lifeworthy and lifeready learning, he’s referring to educational experiences that produce learning we can apply frequently throughout our lives. In Chapter 1, he refers to the two terms this way:
▶ Lifeworthy: Learning that is “likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live.”
▶ Lifeready: Learning that is “ready to pop up on appropriate occasions and help make sense of the world.”
“Without the right sort of teaching and learning, content lifeworthy in principle can turn out not at all lifeready in practice,” he argues. (p. 24)
To achieve learning that is lifeworthy and lifeready, Perkins suggests cross-curricular studies that can make learning deep. To help us get there, he recommends four “quests.”
- Identifying lifeworthy learning in contrast with not-so-lifeworthy learning;
- Choosing what lifeworthy learning to teach from the many possibilities;
- Teaching for lifeworthy learning in ways that make the most of it;
- Constructing a lifeworthy curriculum (p. 24)
Coining the phrase “expert amateurism,” Perkins suggests that educators should “build expert amateurism more than expertise” in their students, because “the expert amateur understands the basics and applies them confidently, correctly, and flexibly.” (p. 38)
Before knees jerk at this thought: Perkins is very clear that expertise in a specific field is not bad; in fact, he encourages it. Rather, he advocates that in today’s world, students need to master the fundamentals of key learning and then decide where they want to specialize. This approach helps assure that individuals have flexibility as well as speciality when it comes to knowledge and skills.
So what is worth learning?
Thinking about what’s worth learning, Perkins suggests 6 “Beyonds.”
1. Beyond the basic skills – 21st century skills and dispositions
2. Beyond the traditional disciplines – renewed, hybrid, and less familiar disciplines
3. Beyond discrete disciplines – interdisciplinary topics and problems
4. Beyond regional perspectives – global perspective, problems, and studies
5. Beyond mastering content – learning to think about where content connects with life situations
6. Beyond prescribed content – much more choice of what to learn (pp. 2-3)
Because “the traditional hierarchical structure of education is a rather clumsy vehicle for engaging the rich information and communication affordances of the contemporary world and preparing today’s learners to thrive in the world” (p. 43), Perkins suggests a learning network approach, richly woven with relevant, cross-curricular learning centered around four BIG understandings (p. 52):
1. Big in insight (helps reveal how our physical, social, artistic, or other worlds work)
2. Big in action (empowers us to take effective action professionally, socially, politically, or in other ways)
3. Big in ethics (urges us toward more ethical, humane, caring mindsets and conduct)
4. Big in opportunity (likely to come up in significant ways in varied circumstances)
Throughout the book, Perkins draws heavily from John Bransford’s work around “transfer of learning that emphasizes preparation for further learning.” The big idea, says Perkins, is that “whatever immediate applications you find for what you’ve just learned, the most valuable returns on investment appear as you build on that foundation to learn in more diverse and sometimes unexpected contexts.” (p. 62)
What’s an educator to do?
As they plan the curricula, Perkins suggests educators ask themselves these important questions, which are similar to identifying “power standards”:
1. Is this knowledge likely to go somewhere in learners’ lives?
2. Does it offer insight, does it inform action, and does it inspire ethics?
3. Is the topic likely to come up often and importantly rather than rarely and trivially?
Perkins also reminds us that much of the knowledge we rely on throughout life does not require deep conceptual understanding but rather understanding of how to do “the right thing at the right time in the right way.” (p. 59) He calls this type of knowledge “recipe knowledge.”
“Recipe knowledge is a wonderful thing. Knowing what to do, we can just get on with it. Moreover, recipes provide much more flexibility than the word suggests.”
We don’t necessarily need a deep conceptual understanding of axles, wheels and brakes to change a flat tire. We just need to know the recipe for tire replacement.
Future Wise is engaging, compelling, and inviting. Each chapter ends with a summary that emphasizes the key points. Throughout the book, Perkins features “Try This” boxes that invite the readers to reflect on a key point and relate it to their own experiences. Looking for a good read to begin your school year? Future Wise might be just the recipe.
Read the Introduction at Amazon
Download a free PDF of Chapter 1
Dancing Mitosis and Designing a Fish (webpost from Chapter 2)
