Yesterday I watched this talk given by Phillip Zimbardo, a psychologist and professor at Stanford University. In the talk, he focuses on how cultures are divided by perspectives of time and uses education as a case study. He broke it down the differences into being “past oriented” or “future oriented”.
Past Oriented
Zimbardo states that our current model of education is a “past oriented” one: a culture that connects to adults and what they needed in order to function based upon their understanding of time. While this model was successful in the past, it has not successful for students today and is leading to a student dropout rate of one student every nine seconds.
Future Oriented
Current students on the other hand, are growing up in a digital age and are “future oriented”. Students are living in a world where they create and play. They are using digital technologies, playing video games, and their sense of time and what is important to them is vastly different from that of adults. Young adults are struggling with the current model of education, as their brains have been “digitally rewired”.
Conflict of Time Perspectives
As we deal with these two orientations, Zimbardo suggests that we do our best to balance this conflict of time perspectives. When thinking of the current education system, it is our job as educational innovators to do the following:
1. Do everything we can to help “past oriented” folks understand the shifts that are taking place and why they matter to how we teach;
2. work with our administrations and teachers to examine alternative paths that reach the “future oriented” students;
3. and find a balance so both “past oriented” teachers and “future oriented” students are successful.
If we can find that balance between the “past oriented” and “future oriented” cultures, our students will be more engaged and will want to be in school. Speak to your administrators, show them this video, and have frank conversations about what approaches work for your school’s culture and moves you closer to addressing the needs of a “future oriented” student body.
See below for examples of some schools that are implementing a different approach to address this problem. Hopefully these examples will help as you try to address the conflict of time perspectives at your respective school.
Links
[...] a nice summary of the video, make sure to stop by David Bill’s blog–Thoughts on the Converging Worlds of Education and [...]
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