Is your school ready for the future? Part 8/12

Building Condition Assessment

Education Readiness Review

 A readiness assessment is required to determine what is needed to create facilities that meet the perceived needs of future educational challenges.  Dr. Darren Cannell will be providing twelve review criteria that can and should be used to reviewing your facilities.  This exercise will  make sure your facilities will be ready for the future educational challenges as predicted by the latest educational research and teaching.

The concern of such an educational review is that it will support future challenges but will not dictate the direction of the educational changes.  The design and approach need to be such that it supports current practices but is versatile enough to accommodate the possible future changes and trends.  To effectively assess the readiness it becomes necessary to review the perceived future trends in educational technology and educational pedagogy and theory.   This review of the trends will have direct ramifications on the facilities and will require certain designs to accommodate these trends.

Dr. Darren Cannell is a consultant who does building assessments and staff training.  He can be contacted at 

dcannell5@gmail.com

The eight of the 12 trends is as follows:

Book library 

Today’s children have new needs, new capabilities, new capacities; they are significantly different in nature from children born before the existence of the 'wired' world.  The “wired” students are accustomed to having personal interest information at their fingertips and like the challenge of lifelong learning.  Creating a lifelong learner is the new goal of twenty-first-century education and can only be achieved by an educator who shares the lifelong learner characteristic. We must all develop the aptitudes and dispositions of lifelong learning if we are to thrive in our dynamic and pluralistic age. 

Using the internet is akin to teaching in the largest library in the world.  The internet is just a click of the mouse away.  The sage on the stage and the book library of the past pales next to the vastness of the internet resources.  It allows teachers to remove themselves from being the focus of the education and allows the students (learners) to be the center of the process.  The learners can actively participate in thinking and discussing ideas while making meaning for themselves.  The content, instruction and assignments effectively delivered via digital devices will naturally changes the teacher’s role to more of a guide. 

“The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.” and an effective teacher is "one who makes himself progressively unnecessary".