Paradigm Shift

In her new book, Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World, Heidi Hayes Jacobs asks “What year are you preparing your students for? 1973? 1995?” (Jacobs, 2010). It’s the first line of her book and is the question on the minds and on the lips of anyone who is looking for ways to ensure that what happens in schools today has relevance for students now and in the future.

One problem schools have in preparing students for the future is that our best predictions about the future are only educated guesses.  A quick search for past predictions about the future will show that even those best positioned to understand and predict changes for the future are prone to missing the mark.  A wrong guess about the future can result in lost opportunities, squandered resources, and ill-equipped students.

Irrespective of the terrain they have to travel, our students need solid foundations and time and space for making sense of their paths through rapidly evolving landscapes.  They need learning experiences today that can prepare them for their future.  In his poem The Way It Is, William Stafford writes about a thread that runs through a life of change and models the kind of independent thought, evaluation, and understanding that is, and will always be, essential.

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of that thread.

ePortfolios that provide students with regular opportunities to own, and post, reflect, and share their learning can become solid platforms that foster and promote metacognition. They have the potential to be a similarly important thread for our students’ lifelong learning.  ePortfolios build the skills, abilities, and capacities that students will need to learn best in any future scenario. They engage students in continuous cycles of interpretation, evaluation, and action.  Over time the result is self-aware, self-motivated thinkers who have deep stores of experience and understanding about how they learn, and first-hand experiences applying their understandings to new and novel learning contexts.

ePortfolios equip students to become agile learners who can skillfully navigate new learning contexts or paradigms that their futures will present.  Schools and school makers who are looking to develop practices that will have enduring value for 21st century learners should grab on to this thread.