We live in an era where Google makes us feel smart, but if we were really smart, wouldn’t we ourselves be able to respond to the questions that recast Google from the simple tool that it is to the magical portal to wisdom that it is perceived to be?

 

The topography of education today is richer and more complex than ever before. The ever-growing body of knowledge about the neuroscience of learning, along with all of the creative and technological advances that inform the practice of teaching, make identifying “best practices” in education a dizzying and debatable task.

 

In addition to this, the broader ecosystem of education today includes a more diverse range of voices that influence the discussion about what should be happening in schools: creativity experts like Sir Ken Robinson, non-experts in who weigh in because they once went to school, disruptors from a variety of sectors, and even non-human voices with internet-based intellect like Apple’s “Siri” and Amazon Echo’s “Alexa.”

 

Together, some of these opinions andattitudes form the logical fallacies and outdated cartography in schools that maintain the centuries-old narrow educational focus on content and test results as key outcomes of learning. But in an easy-to-access content, hyper-connected era, this emphasis on content delivery and testing limits a student’s broader capacity to learn. This emphasis may also produce unintended consequences like alienated student populations and extraordinary dropout rates. Suffice it to say that although content knowledge and testing will always play a role in learning, that role will likely be more limited in an unknowable future, because students will need an increasingly dynamic skill set to function and thrive.

 

Perhaps Albert Einstein had it right when he said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

 

Five years ago, I felt the need to challenge some long-standing assumptions about learning and teaching (my own and those of society) amidst the complexities of the Internet age.

 

At the time, a fifteen-year-old freshman would have been born in the year that Netscape became a publicly traded company and thus triggered the “dot-com” boom. In other words, they had only ever existed within contexts shaped by the worldwide web.

 

This new reality, along with the fact that the history of the world is always growing, prompted me to begin redesigning the World History course at Colorado Academy. Inspired by the design thinking process, my goal for the new course – Global Perspectives in the 21st Century – was to create a more personalized curriculum that focused on the development of student agency, metacognition, and

 

creativity. Part of my vision for the course was for students to learn skills that would allow them to meaningfully access and navigate the oceans of knowledge in the world. Another part of the vision was for students to develop the facility to engage adults in conversations about complex topics and be taken seriously.

 

My belief is that agency and metacognition will give students an intelligent entry point into any conversation.

 

In that first year, one key shift in the curriculum was the addition of a design exercise intended to help students explore the process of integrating self-driving cars into society. In subsequent years, student feedback garnered through design thinking protocols has helped refine the curriculum. However, doing this is an ongoing challenge because 21st century competencies are hard to measure with assessments.

 

As suggested in 2013, the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education wrote, “The assessments we will need in the future do not yet exist.” In addition to this, National Public Radio’s education reporter Anya Kamenetz argues that testing “deprofessionalizes teaching,” particularly the current emphasis on high-stakes testing. For these reasons, the Global Perspectives course emphasizes mastery of skills and metacognition over tests and grades.

 

Student comments about Global Perspectives in the 21st Century over the past few years suggest that it is meeting its goals and vision: “[It] taught me to value knowledge over another person’s perception of what I have learned.” “I feel more creative.... I am challenging and analyzing what I’m being told more.” “[It] greatly helped my writing and speaking abilities while also giving me a better sense of how I think... there is always a practical application of the things we learn...” “This is the only class that really pushes analytical thinking rather than just memorizing information.” But, of course, there is always room for improvement.

 

According to Amanda Ripley, author of The World’s Smartest Kids, world-class learning involves three key factors: freedom [to cultivate student agency]; intellectual rigor [without time-consuming homework]; and emphatic focus on learning [rather than a preoccupation with achievement and extracurriculars]. In the bewildering ecosystem of education, these three factors are the aspirational drivers for the ongoing evolution of the Global Perspectives course. Year after year, we hope that our teaching practices evolve in conjunction with changes in society so that student learning is empowering and meaningful, no matter the social

contexts of students’ lives.