Open

Last term we hosted David Price to speak to staff and some students. He facilitated a very engaging session on PBL and asked insightful questions about our school context. This week we held a book discussion about his outstanding book Open: How we’ll work, live and learn in the future.

Open

Open explains how formal institutions are losing power and how the hierarchy between teacher and students is being transformed through open learning. Open uses the acronym SOFT – share, open, free, trust, and advocates radical transparency. An excellent example of this is this staff handbook for the company Valve. Citing Harold Jarche, Peter Senge, and Stephen Harris, Open points out the major changes wrought by networked working and learning – compared to working and learning in a hierarchy. 90% of learning is informal and we need to become more intentional about informal learning; no successful organisational-learning program is rolled out from the top; and teachers need to be taught to work in teams. The key message is the need for schools to make time and space for collaborative learning. And I really like this parting shot towards the end:

“Perhaps the biggest enclosure of all is the schedule (timetable) that governs learning. Moving kids around each time a bell rings every 50 minutes, only reminds them that they are cogs in an industrial machine, and destroys any attempts to deepen learning, so get rid of the atomised schedule. While you’re at it, get rid of the bell too.”

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