Education and teaching techniques haven’t changed that much over the last 100 years, but new model schools are now emerging that are far more effective than the traditional “chalk and talk”.

The authors of The Learning Revolution, Gordon Dryden and Dr. Jeannette Vos, have identified 12 steps that make a huge difference to education and schooling:

• Make schools life-long, year-round, community resource centers.
• Ask the customers first – students and parents.
• Guarantee customer success and satisfaction.
• Cater to all intelligence traits and all learning styles.
• Use the world’s best teaching, study and learning methods
• Invest in the key resource: teachers as facilitators.
• Make everyone a teachers as well as a student.
• Plan a four-part curriculum, with personal growth, life skills and learning-how-to-learn linked with all content.
• Change the assessment system.
• Use tomorrow’s technology.
• Use the entire community as a resource.
• Give everyone the right to choose.

It makes sense that any vision of the future of education, schools and learning should include these factors:

• Lifelong continual learning will be a fact of life for everyone.
• Inside that context, everyone should be encouraged to plan their own curriculum for life.
• There are many techniques to enable anyone to learn faster, better, smarter. An open-minded search for new ideas is central to tomorrow’s world, and central to tomorrow’s schools.
• Every state or country also has different school-health relationships, administrative systems, teacher training programs. And, as in any other field, progress will often depend on the vision and drive of individual leaders: principals, teachers, parents, administrators and political leaders.

Tags: administrator, education, personal growth, Schools for India, schoolsforindia, teachers, teachers as facilitators, the learning revolution, tomorrow's schools