Context

CONTEXT

Era of Change

The premise of this strategic plan is that powerful global forces enabled by technology are rewriting the public and personal rules by which we live and transforming how we work, communicate, do business, plan for the future, what we know, can do and learn. They press forward at an accelerating pace towards a future that we cannot predict. Institutional and social change and disruption are everywhere; education is not immune.

Technological growth ‒ with accompanying social and economic developments and disruptions, both positive and negative ‒ presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities. We have extraordinary tools and technological capacities at our disposal to confront continued social and political upheaval, environmental change and competition for key resources.

We understand that:

• New roles and relationships have emerged for teachers and students and have redefined relationships between learners and knowledge;
• We live in an era of explosive knowledge growth and unprecedented ubiquitous access to information;
• The pace of change is accelerating and is just now taking hold in education. Once launched, an idea can become mainstream faster than ever. Online and blended learning are now a rapid-growth industry. For example, on-demand videos are available for learning anything, from tying a knot to playing an instrument to calculus. Just a year ago, MOOCs were a novelty; now major universities, policy makers and secondary schools must consider their implications; YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google; and Khan Academy’s success in delivering traditional educational content is being matched by other online academies and educational channels offering content by teachers from around the world. In the independent school world there are clear indications that schools are tackling these changes head-on: The Global Online Academy and the Online School for Girls are up and running; the first Online Education Symposium for Independent Schools was held earlier this year in Los Angeles;and Stanford Online High School is now open for business. This is just the beginning.
• Emerging options and shifting realities make possible a world of any-place, any-time, any-pace learning. They allow for global access and connections with collaborators, colleagues, teachers and mentors from around the world. Every consumer of information is a potential creator of knowledge.
• These new realities contradict the model of schooling that resides in our collective memory. Our challenges include making a compelling case for bricks and mortar place-based learning; finding ways to incorporate online and blended learning options within the school program; and how to make effective and constructive use of technology and harness its power in the service of an education that has meaning, relevance and authentic purpose.

These shifts require us to reflect on how we interact with the world and with each other. We need to step back and reflect on human history and on what it means to be human. And this leads to an ongoing focus on the importance of human relationships, face-to-face communication and actively seeking lives in balance. To find that perspective and equilibrium, we need to restore and strengthen our connections with the non-digital world of people and their needs; practical work and the natural environment.

The future of education demands that we rethink, re-imagine and rebuild the fundamental learning relationships among teachers, students and knowledge. It means establishing and affirming a role for schools and teachers in a world of abundant and ubiquitous information where technology can deliver personalized and customized traditional curriculum content more efficiently than dedicated teachers.

A growing consensus of informed voices concludes that many aspects of traditional schooling that most of us knew in the 20th century are no longer relevant, effective or tenable. Many of the skills and aptitudes that allowed people to thrive in the last century are redundant. Much of what was taught, and the way we taught it, no longer applies.

Building on Our Educational Legacy

A PDS education has never been “traditional.” The tools and thinking now at our disposal mean that we can become even stronger in the things we do well and have always espoused: engaged learning, critical thinking and creative collaborative work that changes lives by connecting joy and purpose to learning and effort.

We will continually seek to graduate self-sustaining learners and flexible thinkers, problem solvers who collaborate widely and communicate effectively. We will continue to nurture and support students and teachers as co-creators and co-learners with highly attuned abilities to access, assimilate, question, synthesize, assess and distill information and to be able to communicate, connect and share across boundaries in order to make a creative contribution to the world. We will continue to focus on high level and meaningful academic work and scholarship. These are attitudes, aptitudes, habits and modes of thinking on which our school will focus.

Implications for the Workplace

Traditional concepts of employment are evolving, just as definitions of education are being rewritten. Along with access to the world’s knowledge; instant communications and global collaboration, we see a growing need for creative, entrepreneurial and compassionate approaches to solving contemporary challenges.

John Dewey told us in 1897 that school is a process for living, not a preparation for future living. Education is a process of becoming, not a training ground for the workforce.

That said, it seems clear that the future work world will require new ways of thinking, creativity, intellectual agility, emotional intelligence and a boundless, resilient capacity for learning, unlearning, connection and collaboration.

In 2010, IBM surveyed more than 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 30 industries worldwide. These executives named creativity as the most important quality for successfully navigating what the US Army War College calls a VUCA environment (for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity).

Digital-age literacies clearly must now include:

• STEM literacy: broad-based general knowledge and understanding of how the world works within and across the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. STEM literacy is an interdisciplinary area of study that bridges the four areas; it does not simply mean achieving literacy in each of these strands or silos. A STEM-literate student also is experienced in problem-solving, analytical, communication and technology skills.
• Economic literacy: knowledge of basic economic concepts, personal finance, the role of small businesses and large corporations, and the impact of economic issues and market forces on individuals and society
• Historical literacy: understanding the processes of historical inquiry, our individual and collective past, the human story of the world and its people and change over time
• Media and Visual literacy: the ability to understand, interpret, use, communicate with and create images and video using both conventional and new media
• Information literacy: the ability to find, access, navigate and use information and the ability to evaluate its credibility
• Cultural literacy: the ability to value and respect diversity; awareness of and sensitivity to cultural issues and expression; and effective cross-cultural communication
• Global awareness: an understanding of how countries, individuals, groups and economies are interconnected.

There is a growing consensus around what have become known as 21st-century skills. Test taking is not among them.

Dr. Tony Wagner of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard offers advice to schools on how to develop student skills they will need in a global society.  He interviewed over 600 CEOs, asking them the same essential question: “Which qualities will our graduates need in the 21st century for success in college, careers, and citizenship?” Wagner’s list of Seven Survival Skills is a distillation of the outcomes of these hundreds of interviews. Here’s the list:

• Critical Thinking and Problem-solving

• Collaboration Across Networks and Leading By Influence

• Agility and Adaptability

• Initiative and Entrepreneurship

• Effective Oral and Written Communication

• Accessing and Analyzing Information

• Curiosity and Imagination

With the options and demands for college and work undergoing dramatic shifts, we can no longer prepare students according to traditional expectations established in the 19th century. Our students will have the chance — and, increasingly, will be expected — to forge their own paths to an education and in the workplace. Through necessity or by choice, increasing numbers of Americans are becoming freelancers and independent contractors.

This is a challenge and an opportunity. It means seeing education as something we craft, not something delivered pre-packaged.

Implications for Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age

Students

As John Palfry and Urs Gasser explain in Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, the children in our schools today are born into a new culture. Those of us who grew up in an earlier era have a choice. We can opt to adapt to this world, accept  that we do not know it as well as our children and look to them to help us learn while we continue to share the values and the experience of the past. Or, we can focus on how good things used to be and resist change. Our students do not have this choice unless they deliberately elect to become hermits. If we wish to connect with our students and help them learn then we must accept that our students are no longer the people the traditional educational system was designed to teach and they do not live in the world that we knew growing up.

Students today have different expectations and experiences than those of earlier generations. They are accustomed to immediate access to information and to using a wide range of tools and resources to share, communicate and learn. Their out-of-school experiences with digital media are often deeply engaging, social, interactive, peer-driven and provide immediate rewards and recognition. This is their milieu and it is one that adults from a different era must strive to understand, take advantage of and help co-navigate.  Students have a learning mindset that sees technology as oxygen – the air they breathe.  They are connected, mobile, social and entertainment-oriented at an increasingly younger age.

Information that was formerly text-based, linear and sequential and parsed out by experts is now readily accessible, easily shared, open and available in multimedia formats. This is a far cry from waiting to ask a teacher or to visit the library to seek information in an encyclopedia.

And rather than a focus on deferred relevance – “knowing this will help you later” – it is instant and on demand when needed: just-in-time, not just-in-case. Learning takes place not just in school but any-time, any-place, any-space and any-pace.

If this is the worldview of our students then we must rethink our assumptions about teaching and learning. In this new culture how do we best convey the values we cherish, model the ethical conduct  we desire and nurture the relationships and communities students need?  What tools, habits, attitudes and capacities will they need to enable them to thrive?

The NAIS Guide to Becoming a School of the Future provides insight into a way forward for schools.  And theNAIS 2012‒2013 Trendbook provides an overview of the shifting contexts for education with a particular focus on independent schools. If the wave of the future is a changed culture for learning and for entrepreneurship, passion-driven expertise and personal brand identity, then the pressure is on to help individuals develop their individual skill sets, strengths and capacities. The era of industrial standardized education is over. One size never did fit all.

These changes require us to think differently and then act differently. The specific changes for schooling include the following shifts, many of which have been hallmarks of – or resonate with – a PDS education since its founding:

From:	To:
Teacher-centered and directed	Learning and learner centered
Content coverage	Learning by doing and making
Memorizing information	Accessing information and putting it to use
Teacher as fount and controller of knowledge	Teacher as coach, guide and senior partner in learning
Whole-group class configuration of one-size-fits-all	Flexible grouping, dependent on activity, interest and project
One way to learn and express understanding	Multiple ways to access and represent knowledge
Assessment driven by memorization and recall	Authentic assessment that draws on higher order thinking skills and creativity
Separate silos of academic disciplines	Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary connected learning
Isolated learner	Connected, networked and collaborative learning
Textbook dependent and driven	Multiple sources of information
Technology as a scarce resource	Ubiquitous access to tools for communication, collaboration and creation
Arts as peripheral luxuries	Arts as the connective tissue of creativity, imagination, intellectual well-being and cognitive growth
Recess as a way to let off steam and play as recreation	Physical activity and play integral to mind-body wellness, invention, growth and cognitive functioning
A focus on student deficits	Recognition of student strengths and interests as an essential building block for further learning
Right answers and an overemphasis on getting things right	Trial-and-error learning that embraces intellectual risk taking and sees failure as information
Assessment as numbers, grades and standards and narrow achievement	Assessment based on reality and growth and  as conversation about new horizons for learning
Student conformity and compliance with set expectations are prized	Student engagement and ownership of learningmatter most
Intelligence as measurable and fixed	Neuroplasticity and a growth mind-set
Isolated classrooms and schools	Flexible learning spaces and networked institutions

 Consensus on Where to Focus

As educators, we are in the future business, whether we like it or not, because it is where our students will live. And while acknowledging that predictions for the future cannot be guaranteed, we do know that one way to prepare for and shape the future is to start building it now.

As we gathered information from surveys and listening sessions, we were struck by a thematic congruity among our constituents – a continuous thread that can be summed up as ”learning by doing.” It confirms a desire for school to be even more about hands-on life skills and the practical world of self-sufficiency, designing, engineering, making, tinkering, doing, building and creating.

A focus on learning by doing resonates with our progressive legacy as a school where learning has always been active and engagement prized. It also connects with the renewed fervor for authentic learning that is taking root in innovative public and independent schools nationwide and indeed globally.

A second theme was an interest in renewed commitment to creativity and the arts and to the physical and natural world. Calls for sustainability, forging more direct and personal connections with the material and natural world are everywhere. We seem to be entering a new golden age of making to learn and learning to make, with the emphasis on project-based learning, STEM to STEAM, design thinking, makerspaces, tinkering studios, fab labs and school gardens.

We also noted an interest in a strong sense of community based at the school and for connection with our local communities through service learning and partnerships with neighboring organizations and institutions. This concern for place-based learning and service-related skills and connections was linked to the hope that our students will develop a sense of global citizenship, deep cultural awareness and a thorough grounding in the essentials of a liberal education and broadly defined scholarship.

These trends and ideas, so compatible with the PDS’s mission and history, also point to our future direction. The school has always prized active and experiential learning, a progressive legacy that serves us well as we contemplate the needs of the future, one ever more focused on:

• Helping students identify, and then develop, their individual strengths, interests and passions to the highest level
• An expansion of the visual and performing arts program and the integration of creative and inventive work across the curriculum – learning by doing and experience
• Community, the sense of belonging, rootedness and connection through service and partnerships: place-based and face-to-face learning
• Broadening and deepening global awareness and levels of cultural competence: feeling at home in the world
• Environmental stewardship
• Agency: developing in students the capacity to tackle the unknown with courage and confidence and make a creative contribution to the world

These goals are based on certain principles about education, namely that it must:

• Cherish the diversity of individual talent and respect cognitive differences
• Nurture creativity, the imagination and a playful mindset that values and supports the arts, divergent thinking, tinkering and the capacity to adapt and change
• Build community, relationships and the sense of belonging
• Convey that intelligence is not fixed, and that our lives and our intellectual, social and personal growth are not linear and are best measured not by standards but by expanding horizons of what we can accomplish alone and together
• Demonstrate in practice, program and pedagogy the learning values we espouse while establishing a broad-based academic foundation of serious work and scholarship

Every student is an individual on a unique journey in a life that unfolds in ways that can be unexpected, circuitous and complex. The powers of creative imagination for every child must be valued and nurtured.

The Role for School

In the networked world, how we define school and what we know about teaching and learning is evolving. The MacArthur Foundation has identified five great shifts related to learning – all of which are made possible or accelerated by ubiquitous technology and access to information and connection.

Connie Yowell – Director of Education Grantmaking at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation – puts it this way:

Connected learning is an answer to three key shifts as society evolves from the industrial age of the 20th century and its one-size-fits-all factory approach to educating youth to a 21st-century networked society:

1) A shift from education to learning. Education is what institutions do, learning is what people do. Digital media enable learning anywhere, anytime; formal learning must also be mobile and just-in-time.

2) A shift from consumption of information to participatory learning. Learning happens best when it is rich in social connections, especially when it is peer-based and organized around learners’ interests, enabling them to create as well as consume information.

3) A shift from institutions to networks. In the digital age, the fundamental operating and delivery systems are networks, not institutions such as schools, which are one node of many on a young person’s network of learning opportunities. People learn across institutions, so an entire learning network must be supported.

Connected learning is not about technology. The principles of connected learning weren’t born in the digital age, but they are extraordinarily well-suited to it.

Connected learning is not about turning our backs on teachers and schools. Thousands of teachers and educators across the U.S. are working hard, often in the face of adversity, to reimagine learning for the next generation.

Connected learning is also not about throwing out traditional literacy skills. The importance of reading, writing and critical thinking are as important as ever. But so are new literacies like advanced problem-solving and collaboration that will be critical in the increasingly interconnected world we dwell in.

Connected Learning: Reimagining the Experience of Education in the Information Age

These shifts from knowing to doing, from teacher-centered classes to student-centered learning, from the individual to the team, from consumption of information to the making of meaning, from schools to networks and from single-sourcing knowledge to crowd-sourcing are expanded in the modified NAIS sidebar below.

Old Model	Examples	New Model	Examples
Knowing	Memorizing facts for a pen and paper test	Doing	Applying knowledge and skills in a demonstration of learning
Teacher-centered	Textbook-derived lecture	Student-centered	Student-led seminar and partner “labs” in all disciplines
The Individual	Competition for grades, honor roll, and class rank	The Team	Collaboration in a project-based learning context
Consumption of Information	Knowledge is expendable with a short shelf-life	Construction of Meaning	Knowledge is a means to produce long-term meaning
Schools	Place-bound: learn inside the box of the classroom	Networks	Schools without borders: learn in the local and global communities digitally and/or via expeditions
Single Sourcing	Dated information with single point of view being the source of information and knowledge — the textbook	Crowd Sourcing	Experts with multiple perspectives and points of view produce and curate information — Wikipedia, etc.

These “shifts” connect with what a Poughkeepsie Day School education has always stood for and what it has always sought to achieve. Connected learning breathes new life into our traditional model and design.

The new roles for educators are as co-creators, thinkers and contributors rather than as gatekeepers, distributors and arbiters of information. And herein lies the new role for school.

Teaching is an art form, not a delivery system: Teachers don’t teach subjects, they teach children. Deep knowledge of, and passion for, academic disciplines must be matched by the understanding of how students learn and by a commitment to creating learning environments that serve students. Teachers and students dwell together in the cultural ecosystem of a school that needs to be rich with opportunities, simultaneously demanding and forgiving; strong in support and deep in empathy and compassion: a place where intellectual risk-taking is just what happens as minds and capacities grow.

Shiny new technologies and ubiquitous access to the world’s knowledge do not automatically translate into self-directed, organized, autonomous, literate, free range learners eager to take advantage of the opportunities.

We need teachers and schools to help students identify needs, find passion and purpose, build the skills of connection in safe and ethical ways, pursue deep interdisciplinary thinking and develop the capacity to persist in the face of difficulty. We need teachers and schools to prepare students not for the world we have known, but for the world they currently inhabit and into which they will emerge.

School must be about what it has always been at its best: a place where children go to learn with others, in real time, face-to face with teachers who inspire them by being learners themselves; a place of shared and mediated experience where students interact with each other and their teachers to find purpose and develop mastery and expertise. School is also a place where students are supported in taking advantage of, and experiencing, online and blended learning opportunities to enrich their education.

The role of Poughkeepsie Day School is to live its mission and help students develop as educated global citizens with a passion for learning, leading and living.

The Plan and Its Goals

A PDS education is a promise for the future that arises from the quality of life in the now. In this context we offer our strategic plan and the following commitments for the future of PDS.

The plan’s five interrelated goals begin with the mission and the values we cherish that reside at the core of our school. At PDS we see school as a place for:

Curiosity, creativity, caring, collaboration, integrity, courage, self-awareness, wonder and connection – where students develop the essential academic, practical and social capacities to make a creative contribution to the world.

We seek to enable students to experience school in ways that will serve them for a lifetime as educated and engaged global citizens who can think, create, share, team, lead and who care to contribute.

Our work is guided by 8 leading questions:

• What is our mission?
• What are our guiding values?
• What is our identity as a school?
• Who attends PDS?
• What are our learning outcomes for students?
• What is the relationship at our school between students, teachers and knowledge?
• What is the PDS design for learning
• What is the PDS difference and why does it matter?