New York Times Schools for Tomorrow

Redesigning learning environments to meet changing needs of future learners and teachers:
 
A Call for Leadership White Paper by Joyce Pittman, PhD; Drexel University 9/22/2011
 
Against a backdrop of globalization, the increasing role of technology, an ever-more diverse population of learners and the changing nature of social interaction, how do leaders approach and make decisions about redesigning learning environments for the next generation of learners and educators? This white paper will shed light on practices driving the need to create new learning environments, identify conditions that support innovations in redesigning learning environments and pedagogical reforms, and hopefully advance the conversation. Strategies and resources to explore these questions will be surveyed. Six ideas to advance research on the role of leadership, emerging technologies and virtual learning will be presented.

Overview

Effective leaders in today’s complex organizations must efficiently navigate knowledge networks to access, assess and collaborate on information in real time to make the best policy decisions. Successful leaders in today’s educational organizations have the additional duty of identifying and engaging multiple internal and external stakeholders with divergent goals, objectives and needs. Only by systemic thinking, a commitment to sustainability and meaningful interaction between institutional leadership, learners, faculty and the community at large can we ensure that the changes educational bodies must implement to meet these changing needs are based in well-researched, grounded theory, properly understood, effectively implemented, leading to appropriate, meaningful improvements for all.

Just as changing policy and practice is now a collaborative, information-driven, “out-of-the-box” process, learning and the environments in which learning take place have changed. Technology and communications breakthroughs allow for the creation, delivery and management of immersive and interactive online learning and assessment, anywhere, anytime. An advanced degree student may be completing coursework while attending to outpatients at a clinic, preparing to deliver instruction, or even in a theater of war (Independence University, 2007).

While many classrooms and programs of instruction have changed from a teacher-driven to collaborative, learner-driven experience, the effective makeover of learning environments to accommodate learners’ and faculty’s changing needs is hardly a given. Like their counterparts in business, industry and government, many in the educational sector are more likely to see technology as an adjunct to educational transformation and not a key driver and facilitator for improvement. As with policy, learners, educators, institutional and community leaders, along with the educational research community, will have to take a closer look at the interface between technology and pedagogy for their respective programs, share and reflect on their experiences, and work cooperatively in the process to create learning spaces that blend the best of online and personal instruction modes to better serve learners, support curricula, be transparent to faculty, and continue to be accountable to their institutions and communities.

Assumptions

While leaders in education can draw from many models of leadership and organizational philosophies, systems thinking (viewing the interactions of individuals within their organization) and sustainability (the capacity to endure) is frequently present in exemplary programs studied for this paper. In an uncertain national climate subject to constant change, it becomes all the more critical that leaders hold and successfully articulate a holistic, long term view.

Questions and purpose

How do we redesign learning environments in response to the changing educational needs of students and educators? How are educational needs of future learners and educators driving the role of emerging technologies and virtual learning?
Key principles flowing from these two questions are then explored: providing better services for teachers and students, investing financially, identifying theoretical framework(s) for curriculum and instructional development, introducing new approaches to learning, utilizing social networking technology to enhance opportunities for learning, and articulating a clear vision for change.

The objective of this paper to explore principles and practices that can help us better understand the conditions driving the need to create new learning environments, identify factors that support innovation in the redesign of learning environments to address ongoing reform in pedagogy and upcoming educational organization designs and advance the discussion on these two issues.

Follow this link to read the full paper as presented during the New York Times Schools for Tomorrow Conference, New York Times Center, NY on September 22, 2011.
http://nytschoolsfortomorrow.com/speakers.html