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WHAT SKILLS WILL OUR CHILDREN NEED IN THE DIGITAL FUTURE?

Stuart McNaughton

IN 1986, LOOKING BACK OVER HIS LONG CAREER, Clarence Beeby, the visionary architect of New Zealand education, proposed that our school system had been defined by three overarching myths. His idea of myths was not pejorative. He was identifying the presence of a shared narrative, a shared understanding, which represented and focused our intentions. In chronological sequence these were: the Myth of the Survival of the Fittest; the Myth of the Education of the Whole Child; and from the late 1930s, during his tenure as Director of Education, the Myth of the Equality of Opportunities.

Each of these myths framed how individual students were viewed in the system. Within the time of Beeby’s third myth, and due to his leadership, opportunities were created: the Proficiency Exam, which had restricted access to secondary education, was abolished; a process of teacher judgement via accreditation was used for entrance to university; and School Certificate was introduced as a school-leaving qualification to recognise the skills and knowledge of all students, especially those not wishing to go on to further study.

Beeby argued that each of these myths typically lasted 25 years or more, and that any deep-seated change in a system would typically take a generation or more to get in place. By the 1970s — after more than a generation — the inadequacies of the third myth became obvious and a rethink was forced by two powerful forces. One came from Kura Kaupapa Māori innovations in education, and the other came from educational explanations of how inequalities in achievement can occur. These combined in a powerful critique of the old narrative. Counter to the assumptions of what equality of opportunity could produce, the perverse consequence was that equal opportunities lead inexorably to unequal outcomes. The development of Te Kohanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Māori came from a deep frustration with a one-size-fits-all system in which opportunities could not be capitalised on equally. Providing equal opportunities is fertile ground for exploitation by those with the appropriate ‘cultural capital’, and often lead to Matthew Effects. These effects, common to education and health, occur when those who have more to begin with can make more of an opportunity; those with less may only be able to make less, with differences in what is achieved compounding over time. These ‘rich get richer and poor get poorer’ effects are well known, and are a default condition that occurs if there is no deliberate focus on making a difference to such outcomes.

The original educational example for Matthew Effects is vocabulary learning. Differences in rates of learning emerge before the school years, and contribute to educational disparities. Even at 18 months of age, children in higher socio-economic status (SES) families know more of the words that stand them in good stead at school than their lower-income peers. On entry to school, the more words one knows that are consistent with the language of instruction, means the more words one can acquire through the language opportunities in schooling — in books and classroom talk — and the converse also applies. These differences become exaggerated over time.

The second force for change was an obvious lack of desirable outcomes. Opportunity clearly was associated with large and increasing disparities between different groups of students. The disparity patterns — or, as they came to be called, ‘gaps’ — were known hitherto, but were thrown into stark relief by the first of the international comparisons in 1970. A New Zealand researcher, Warwick Elley, led that work, and since then international studies and local system monitoring have repeatedly demonstrated a pattern of good news / bad news. On some measures of achievement we are better (substantially so) than many OECD countries. But — and it is a very big but — we have had large gaps, in the form of a wide spread of scores with an over-representation of students from different communities in the long tail of the distributions of achievement. Children from low-SES households are over-represented, as are Māori and Pasifika children. And the effects of SES, already around the OECD average in the early studies, became larger over time.

A fourth narrative, of Making a Difference to Outcomes, emerged. In this narrative, a number of fundamental system changes took place. These were aimed at tilting the otherwise level playing field. Following national consultation through the 1980s, the whole school curriculum was revised with both an English mainstream and a parallel Māori framework, Te Marautanga o Aotearoa. Similarly, following extensive consultation, the world-leading early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki was established. These three curricula explicitly recognised diversity and the bicultural treaty framework. They were imbued with a strong closing-the-gap rhetoric, and explicitly posed a principle of outcomes.

More changes followed. In 1989 a remarkable redesign of the management of schools took place. Schools were made more accountable to their local communities through becoming self-managing and autonomous. Following the Tomorrow’s Schools redesign, in 1995 we developed a resourcing model for schools, the decile system, that recognised the need to provide extra funding to schools serving low-SES and culturally diverse communities. Major changes in curricula and resources also occurred, so that by 2002 the senior secondary exams were not just overhauled but also had their core principles removed. The redesign changed exams from a normative bell-curve-based system, in which 50 per cent of students failed, to a standards-based system. This created wide choice and a variety of pathways for students through to the graduation standard of NCEA 2.

Primary schools followed these developments in assessments, and in 2008 National Standards were put in place, which were based on teacher judgements. While the initial logic was to increase accountability to families and whānau, they came to be used to support the relentless focus on closing the gaps. Better public service goals were added to this regime to achieve parities. The system would be held accountable for meeting targets, such as a 95 per cent participation rate in early childhood education.

We have reached the generation of time estimated by Beeby for this Myth of Making a Difference. On the positive side there really have been reductions in some disparities, from participation in early childhood education through to pass rates in NCEA level 2. On the negative side, we know that there are persistent differences in core areas of children’s development in the early years, and that these tend to remain. At school, the reduced disparities hide some subtle but very potent continuing disparities. For example, despite increased achievement at NCEA level 2, the low trajectory through the senior high-school exams for Māori and Pasifika students, and those from low-decile schools, often leads to under-representation in academic pathways such as science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects.

The logic of the narrative focused attention on the quality of teaching, which was seen as not up to the challenge, and on increasing its effectiveness. Among the range of evidence for this assumption were statistical models that showed there was wide variability of achievement within schools compared with variability between schools. Unfortunately, it turns out that we wrongly interpreted this as showing that the quality of teaching alone would make the difference to the gaps. The variability within schools can be caused by mechanisms other than the sheer quality of the teaching, such as grouping and de facto streaming evident in the NCEA data.

Moreover, the achievement differences between schools is not trivial, especially at the extremes of the decile range. The targeted decile funding cannot compensate for the differences in resources available from the communities which schools serve. Fund-raising and access to all sorts of extra goods and services in schools serving higher SES communities are not things even the highest-quality teaching in schools serving lower SES could easily override. And being self-managing only serves to exaggerate the between-school differences, because schools in competition don’t and can’t learn from each other. A more accurate picture also identifies substantial variability between schools, independent of their decile ranking, meaning there is an issue at the level of a school’s effectiveness.

Despite this picture, there is cause for some optimism. The new disparities might be solved with two policy directions that are in play. One is changing the Tomorrow’s Schools design, the first step of which has been to develop the agency of groups of schools to act together in a form of micro-district, or Kāhui Ako (‘community of learning’). If we get this design right, we can more easily and effectively contribute to solving the disparities through sharing effective practices, but this requires three key developments. One is connecting the currently loosely coupled key transitions of children’s learning and effective teaching, right through from early childhood, primary, secondary and post-secondary education to training. The second lies in fully resourcing clusters for using their own evidence for judging their effectiveness; and that includes smart digital and data tools, the development which will need rapid expansion under the next myth — a development explored further below.

The third necessary development is providing professional and research resources to school communities to design, test and redesign their instruction in cycles of continuous improvement. This presents a challenge for educational research. Understanding how change occurs, and contributing to schools’ change, requires a long-term, deliberate research agenda, and the science of change is complex. For too long, too many of us have relied on contemplative, over-theorised and passive research agendas, describing the same truths of structural inequality (the gaps), using increasingly arcane theories. We need research and researchers who have come to grips with the realities of working with schools to add value to their work, applying the hard science of testing and developing positive solutions to their challenges. Unfortunately, research that has tried to intervene or systematically develop and test new ways of teaching and learning has had limited funding and been undervalued in educational research. It has often been criticised as being ‘neoliberal’ or ‘positivist’ because of its use of quantitative and experimental methods, and we have not been very good at producing cohorts of researchers with the requisite skills to do the science required.

The second policy direction that might help is a new focus on reducing poverty — and related social conditions, such as housing — which can be a cause of educational underachievement. It is not the immediate cause at the coalface in classrooms, but nevertheless is the distal condition that limits how effective schools can really be. However precise the funding models, schools alone cannot make up those differences that are attributable to the exigencies of poverty at scale. Arguably, accepting the stultifying and limiting role of poverty in what schools can do has been hampered by the existing Making a Difference narrative, and especially by the default to seeing teaching quality as the root cause. So it is time to put this fourth myth to bed, too.

The fifth myth: Cultural Well-being 2.0

My candidate for setting the next of our educational visions — the fifth of the shared narratives — combines building cultural well-being with digital futures. Understanding this vision depends on being clear about the core purpose of an educational system. A school system is a secondary means for socialising our children. Its actual function can take different forms in pluralistic and multicultural societies: ranging from complementing and amplifying the values, norms and practices of constituent communities and extending their expectations; through redressing existing imbalances and conflicts in communities’ needs; to shoring up existing inequalities and being antagonistic to change. At the time of writing, we have examples across countries of each of these. At one extreme the increasingly inequitable society of the United States to which its educational system contributes. At the other extreme have been some Scandinavian and Nordic countries, which have been more equitable, and to which their educational systems have contributed. If we in New Zealand get it right, education can have more of a unifying and enabling set of functions for all of our communities. If we get it wrong, our experiences of the previous myths suggest we will maintain existing inequities and inadequacies and also create new ones.

Our new unifying myth needs to address the needs for the well-being of children and families in digital futures, which are common to all, while also providing for specific cultural expressions in those futures.

There is no need here to rehearse in detail what the presence of digital tools, including the Internet of Things and skills, means. Suffice it to say that by 2015, already more than 8 out of 10 children from age 10 had a cell phone, and more than 9 out of 10 used the internet at least on a weekly basis. Already then, too, almost all schools were using some form of online learning in the classroom. Schools have been in rapid transition to fully digital environments, with ubiquitous 1:1 use of online devices, tools and technologies.

The futures are signalled in five trends.

Firstly, participation as a citizen is changing. The internet and social media afford increasingly immediate and direct access to networks, commentary, information and ideas, with a consequent amplification of contacts, social influence and the shaping of ideas and beliefs. An increasingly well-informed and critically aware citizenry, with increased social cohesion and with attendant greater mental health, is a possible benefit.

If we in New Zealand get it right, education can have more of a unifying and enabling set of functions for all of our communities.

But there are risks. For example, self-perpetuating silos of shared knowledge acting as ‘echo chambers’ can be created. The potential consequence is the uncritical adoption of positions on political and other issues, with misinformation and uninformed resistance to alternative views. Consider what computational propaganda can do already. Using algorithms, automation and human curation we can distribute misleading information over social media networks, enabling us to influence popular decision-making and powerfully shape views.

Secondly, there are trends to do with individual well-being. Our track-record for children and adolescent mental health and well-being in New Zealand is not good. There is something about our history and its cultural norms and practices that mean our students experience higher-than-average levels of stress, isolation and disengagement from schools, along with specific threats such as bullying.

We know that educational provisions from early childhood services through to secondary schools can help here. Self-control skills, as well as social skills of empathy and perspective-taking, are important for both individual and societal well-being. We also know that digital technology in the classroom can have important positive effects on these. But there are echoes in our approach to building these skills that mirror an earlier reluctance to mandate car seat-belts for children. The skills are only really implicit within our early childhood and school curricula, referred to there either as dispositions or as competencies, and neither way helps with setting specific objectives. Shamefully we don’t value these skills by systematically measuring them, let alone set national expectations for using widespread and consistent evidence-based approaches to promote them. Unsurprisingly, schools are at best inconsistent in their promotion. This is not surprising, because the curriculum actually says that teachers will individually figure out what these ‘competencies’ are and how to teach them.

Risks to well-being are posed by digital futures. High amounts of use can increase distractibility and addiction-like behaviours. Worryingly, an online ‘disinhibition effect’ has been found whereby users of the internet and social media tend to be less inhibited and have reduced judgements of the appropriateness of their behaviour. Patterns of bullying behaviour are changing, and cyber-bullying is associated with the same negative consequences that face-to-face bullying has, with some groups being particularly vulnerable.

A third trend relates to the cognitive benefits of digital environments, including what digital games can provide. There is no doubt that they can provide benefits. But benefits accrue under very specific conditions, where tasks are pitched at the right level and supported by quality teaching. And again, there are costs, especially with early and extensive cumulative use. When content is of questionable quality, the consequences include being less able to understand others’ thoughts and feelings, as well as poorer self-regulation.

We have known for some time, too, that providing digital devices alone does not consistently increase academic learning and raise students’ achievement levels. This is despite the increased learner engagement (so-called ‘learner agency’) that reliably accompanies the new technology in classrooms. Other conditions need to be met to guarantee good learning outcomes, not surprisingly to do with the quality of teaching.

Parental engagement is important in educational systems. So the fourth trend concerns how experiences in families affect learning at school. Some effects can be positive. Increased connection and relationships between family members is possible, and this can be related to better mental health outcomes. Beyond this increased connectivity, value can be added with access to and use of well-designed digital tools, such as apps and interactive programs which involve children and families (such as reading interactive books with young children).

However, despite the burgeoning market in digital devices for parenting, very few of the digital tools that are marketed as ‘educational’ have been tested in rigorous experiments. Moreover, some digital tools can have negative effects, unintended or intended, because of their design. An obvious problem also occurs with overuse of digital devices by parents, which reduces time spent on one of the basic building blocks of family relationships: face-to-face interaction.

Providing digital devices alone does not consistently increase academic learning and raise students’ achievement levels.

The fifth trend concerns what happens after schooling; the so-called future of work. Workplaces increasingly require a minimum level of digital skills. Already, those with higher levels of problem-solving using digital skills gain higher rates of employment and receive higher wages. Job automation is on the rise, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital tools is forecast to result in a reduction in workforce needs in particular jobs. The labour market increasingly rewards social skills, especially those relating to teamwork, collaboration and oral communication skills, and this means these skills are at a premium.

How could a new myth support the benefits of digital realities and reduce their risks? What do students need to learn, and how might teaching change? Here are my candidates.

Cultural Well-being 2.0: critical thinking and critical literacy

The deliberate development of critical thinking and critical literacy skills through the subjects we value needs to be a priority. These skills include: strategic problem-solving; being able to recognise when information is needed; and locating, evaluating and using the needed information effectively. They entail being aware of authority and bias in order to make judgements about the reliability and usefulness of information. These skills are especially required in the new digital environments. We need citizens who can navigate in, and be able to critically engage with, the knowledge and information that impinge on everyday lives, including scientific knowledge.

These skills can be taught. To be robust and generalisable, they need to be taught within and across the curriculum content areas, not somehow separately as though they are generic and content-free. In each content area we need to use authentic problems, ones that make sense to our students in their social and cultural worlds. Local issues like reasoning about the rights and responsibilities for commercialising local natural resources are complex and open-ended, and provide powerful vehicles to both develop and apply knowledge across subject areas, and to develop and apply critical thinking and literacy skills. A recent Minister of Education referred to this approach as constituting a ‘local curriculum’, and it is through this local curriculum that we can best engage and promote students’ skills that transcend the local.

The importance of content reflects an uncomfortable fact, which is that learning is much more content-specific than we often assume. This is why I do not propose that we teach all children, or even the majority, computational thinking and programming skills. These are just new contexts for teaching what we have previously called critical thinking. Grandiose claims are made about their wide significance; that we can change a generation’s way of thinking across many areas of knowledge by teaching computational skills through programming. Similar claims were made in the early 1900s about the importance of Latin as a ‘formal discipline’. It turned out that learning Latin is largely good for learning Latin.

But despite not mandating programming, we do need students to develop a critical digital literacy, one in which they learn how to knowledgeably appraise the design and function of programs and apps and yet-to-be-invented forms of digital tools. They do need to understand the nature of the digital algorithms sitting behind applications and games, so they can spot those that are risky; for example, those that promote gambling. And despite the content specificity, we also know that the more we learn similar skills across different activities, the more the skills are generalisable. We need a curriculum of ethical criticality across content areas, grounded within valued areas of knowledge and integrated across those areas.

Cultural Well-being 2.0: social skills

A second priority is the skills of self-control and being socially adept; being empathetic, collaborative and able to appreciate another’s perspective. Right now these have a powerful role in educational trajectories, in post-school outcomes, and in a range of individual and collective benefits. And they will become increasingly significant, certainly for employment, but importantly for resilience and well-being across the life course. Facility with social media, AI and digital tools requires them, and they are skills for surviving the risks posed by these very same tools.

Like the critical skills, self-control and social skills can be taught, and from an early age. They need to be taught in a context of caring teacher and student relationships, and safe and orderly environments imbued with norms and values for high expectations and academic success. They, too, need to be deliberately taught within the everyday activities that teachers and students create across subject areas, both face-to-face and virtually; with active forms of learning, sufficient time being devoted, and careful monitoring.

These are not generic, abstracted skills. They are learned within, and are expressed within, specific activities. Both the content and the focus of teaching contribute. Reading high-quality books can increase empathy. Solving maths problems and critically reasoning in science topics, as well as reading canonical texts, can be vehicles for learning self-control and social skills. Equally significantly, collaboratively solving technology and maths problems, and critically reasoning with science topics, provide similar opportunities for promoting social skills. Secondary teachers have had a mantra that every teacher is a teacher of literacy. It is true. But the new myth’s mantra is that every teacher is a teacher of self-control and social skills.

I earlier reviewed how social media, the internet and other digital tools pose new challenges, both to self-control and to our interactions with others. The digital disinhibition effect means that, without thinking, children and young people can engage with the tools in ways that are harmful to mental health, their own as well as others’. Currently schools deal with this by promoting forms of digital citizenship in idiosyncratic and variable ways. Our new myth should underpin a national plan to systematically develop self-control and social skills, guaranteeing their learning for our children and their employment in digital contexts.

Although in its infancy, designing games with a focus on learning these skills is already happening. We can design for attributes like conscientiousness, intellectual openness, work ethic, teamwork, collaboration and leadership. But here again we need a planned research and e-development strategy.

Cultural Well-being 2.0: teaching and learning

The ‘how’ for achieving these priority areas introduces a curious contradiction. The future of teaching within this narrative has several directions. The first of these, harking back to our pedagogical past, involves a return to the core properties of being effective. The most effective forms of teaching we know take place within what is quintessentially human, extended deliberate responsive interactions underpinned by positive relationships. In the case of teaching, however, it is not just talk. The dialogue required needs to be very precise and very well designed, to enable implicit and explicit forms of guidance. In a Cultural Well-being 2.0 world these can be both face-to-face and virtual, but in any case much better planned and designed than heretofore.

To do this requires a different direction, and very smart approaches across age levels and content areas. ‘Smart’ means having at one’s disposal precision teaching and learning tools. Unfortunately, in this regard we lag behind other sectors such as agriculture. Farmers already have access to smart tools that integrate data for critical decision-making. For instance, an existing app provides data on areas of risk for water run-off. Linked with virtual fencing technology (in the form of a GPS collar on animals), the farmer can make judgements in real time and intervene precisely to prevent overuse and pollution, and to optimise the use of water.

This is an analogy. Teachers are not farmers, and learners not cows. But by comparison we in education have crude smart tools. Even so, the archiving and analytic functions that are currently possible presage the development of smart analytics for teachers and students to be data-based, contingent and precise in teaching and learning. We already know that digital tools can impact on students’ higher-order writing activities, such as editing, synthesising from texts, doing topic-based online research, and recasting digital objects. This is because of the archiving and existing analytic possibilities. We need a rapidly expanded research and development enterprise to deliver smart analytics for precision teaching.

A Cultural Well-being 2.0 world will require directions to teaching and learning, which enable agency for both learners and teachers. Much is made of what the future means for learning; what it means for more and varied forms of collaborative, networked or ‘lateral’ learning on the one hand, and greater learner agency on the other: where the relationships between teaching and learning are less hierarchical, more synchronous, more distributed in time and place and more personalised. The digital world promises these affordances across time and space, not bounded by a physical classroom.

There is a more complex and contingent reality than a simple romantic view for digital learning that assumes learners will be able to take control of their learning, and the role of teachers will be reduced to being helpful bystanders. Optimising the digital promise requires even more knowledgeable teachers who can augment the digital tools, who are experts in instructional design; teachers whose language and human skills become even more important, and are an integral part of the instructional design. Without greatly increased agency by the teacher, we can’t realise the promise, and we can’t guarantee the learning of the social and cognitive skills.

Game-based learning illustrates the point about being deliberate. To date the games have largely been about knowledge acquisition and strategy learning, rather than critical thinking and critical literacy or the social skills. And we have not fully recognised how even serious games, those designed to impact on academic learning, need to be augmented by good teaching.

The research and e-development strategy to deliver tools for precision teaching and learning will perforce provide greatly enhanced resources with which teachers can design instruction, and with which learners have increased agency. Texts for understanding the social and physical world — past, present and future — can be bundled and re-bundled virtually with extraordinary accessibility; creation and artistic design through digital learning objects will greatly enhance how students express identities; concepts and application contexts can be manipulated with powerful agility.

Caveats

There are several caveats to realising this myth. One is the potential for digital divides. A digital divide exists already around the world, in the form of lesser access to digital tools for marginalised or poorer communities. It is apparent here in New Zealand, too, exacerbated by self-managing schools and by the lack of a fully resourced national school system. The ‘bring your own device’ approach favours those with the cultural capital to purchase and use (although there are public-good partnerships with philanthropic funding that show how this particular digital divide can be mitigated).

A second divide is more insidious. It is the potential for less-complex usage patterns in classrooms and schools that have fewer resources on which to call. The evidence from the last of Beeby’s narratives and its successor of reducing gaps have shown how difficult it is to redress inequalities in education. Among the unequal resources are those in schools themselves: the resources for teaching and learning. As an example, differences can be found (and not only in New Zealand) in the qualifications of teachers, or in the specialist areas for teaching in schools serving poorer communities. Our digital future needs to guarantee that all schools are provided with and able to use technology and tools that are highly challenging and cognitively complex.

The second caveat is the risk of a unilateral view of what well-being and resilience look like. Much of what is written about learner agency and digital affordances assumes an individual focused on an independent task, and there is a similarly narrow view on what we value in our assessments. In primary education, for instance, a favoured writing assessment uses ‘persuasive’ texts: assessing skills for presenting one’s own position; and in secondary, external National Certificate of Educational Achievement standards prototypically require independent performance.

The image of the solitary individual with agency is only one framing of what a resilient learner should be like. This is not just a misunderstanding of the nature of skills for future work. It is also a form of cultural ignorance. We have good cultural models that provide varied expressions of resilience and well-being. There is a future for us in which our teachers and students are agile in foregrounding forms of well-being that are suitable for different purposes and emphasise different properties. Alongside the social skills of empathy, perspective-taking and collaboration are the skills of collective and reciprocal responsibilities for teaching and learning. Māori research has identified these, expressed in basic concepts, such as: ākonga/kaiako (learner/teacher) and tuākana/tēina (older/younger sibling) roles; principles of caring (manaakitanga); high expectations (mana motuhake); secure and well-managed environments (whakapiringatanga); interactional and best-practice teaching (waananga and ako); and evidence-based monitoring (kotahitanga).

Our digital future needs to guarantee that all schools are provided with and able to use technology and tools that are highly challenging and cognitively complex.

A third caveat follows from the new forms of design expertise, and from the digital affordances themselves. Initial teacher education and ongoing professional development will need to prepare and continually upskill teachers in Cultural Well-being 2.0. Reports into the weaknesses of teacher education and professional development abound. Cultural Well-being 2.0 requires a national recognition of the high status of teachers and commensurate pay in keeping with their increased responsibilities, with an uncompromising selection of the smartest and best who can design well to teach these complex skills. Other countries do this; Singapore and Finland come to mind.

The final caveat is about evidence and its use. There is a truth — not a myth — with which education has struggled. It is the funding, forms and functions of the research that can make a difference to innovation and futures. Currently, New Zealand spends about 1.3 per cent of GDP on research and development. That is small in global terms. But within that national picture the funding of educational research and development is astonishingly small, given the significance of education to GDP, let alone to the well-being of citizens. All possible sources of educational research and development, including Ministry of Education evaluation, amount to around $15 million per annum. Admittedly, research scientists in education can draw on core disciplines to access other funding in the social sciences. But often the need to understand and design with professional partners for educational change doesn’t fit funding categories neatly.

Such low funding levels severely limit any effort to contribute substantially in a national system of research and development hubs partnered with schools, and they also compromise our effectiveness in the fifth myth. We are hampered by this, and our understanding of how education can best promote the well-being of informed, talented and actively engaged citizens in our shared digital futures will suffer without well-resourced research and development.