It’s a little bit Montessori, that’s true. Also, in the senior high school level, to encourage people to discover their connection with the local community, with the society more, by having each school teacher and parent association design the courses for that particular school.
Every school, even in the best education system, get to experiment a little bit. The whole idea, really, is to make teachers co-learners, and stop teaching, really, and just help children discover themselves.
We took the 10 years of experimental education in Taiwan, not all of them works actually, so we took the parts that worked, and folded them into the basic education system. We have the examination system, the university credit system for instance.
At the moment, everyone think they need to finish four years of university before going to the society. Now, we’re saying, "OK. If you finish junior high, you can actually go to start something, do some project, and come back to college later. And after a couple of years in college, you can actually go out and do some experiments and go back. Maybe you need a different set of skills."
How the university engage with learners will change, it’s not one single major, one single diploma anymore, it is bundles of credits, bundles of works that you can continue in lifelong fashion. It will completely reshape the expectation of university education.
I think that’s part of the paradigm shift that we’re telling people, the community and the college, the university, and whatever, they are just resources and anyone are entitled to use them according to their own needs, not what their teacher or professor instruct them to do.
The autonomy becomes driven by the students. That’s the main curriculum change philosophy. I think we’re pretty ready for that next year.
There’s plenty. The National, I think, Normal University, the one that teaches teachers, is already adjusting to the new curriculum. There is many, actually, horizontal connected teacher networks to prepare their classes together.
Taiwan is very highly connected on the Internet everywhere, most of our population has broadband access. There is just those spontaneous, horizontal groups and meet-ups formed by teachers, like collaboration groups, that talks mostly about adjusting their skills from those lecturing skills to listening, empowerment, facilitation skills.
There’s plenty of workshops, also, and quite a few magazines dedicated for this kind of thing. It’s really happening. Used to be the plan was the curriculum would take place this year, but because of some controversy surrounding the history class, we delay everything by one year.
We are really seeing this year a lot of pilot schools, a lot of pilot high school, or just primary schools, that are already using the new curriculum for teaching. Maybe in selected classes, maybe just in one grade, or something like that.
They are already actively sharing their new experience. If you look them up, there is this 108-curriculum support group on materials. You find quite a few online, as well as offline. That’s the basic education.
I completely agree with the idea of making autonomous learning into a new norm of basic education. If we just let the experimentation schoolers be autonomous, frankly speaking, it’s just a small fraction of people. We really need to take the best ideas, and then scale them out in the basic education system.
Yeah, because of the two dynamics. It’s that the schools are getting less and less tutor, just because of population, which means that there is more fraction of a teacher’s time that each child enjoy.
Because of that, in senior high, there is going to be a lot of empty classrooms if we’re not doing a curriculum change, just by the nature of less tutor, being more independent. Instead of saying those are empty classrooms, we’re saying, "No, we’re designing the course so the child selects their own course."
Maybe they want to learn indigenous languages. Maybe they want to learn a lot of things. Those classes are collaboratively built up with community support, with specialty teachers, with school design curriculum to rebuild the classrooms so that it’s still put into good utility.
Because the education budget is constitutionally protected, there is going to be this many budget, anyway. The resource per child is also increasing, just by the virtue of having less children.
All this are what we are taking into consideration when we are building the new curriculum. We’re free of a lot of constraint in the previous eras, where there is 50 children in a class. There is very little innovation you can do when you have 50 children in a class.
You can only indoctrinate, or whatever.
Exactly. Now, it’s just 15 or 20 per class. It’s much easier.
Same here.
That’s what my disclaimer means. I’m acting always in an individual’s capacity. I really like listening to people. That’s my main work, actually. I’m being paid by taxpayers to listen to people.
And answer them, but that’s just to get them talk more.
Exactly right. No, but seriously, I do think a lot of political issues, you mentioned there’s no shortcut. The shortest path often is just to get everyone listening to everyone else. That’s the shortest already. It’s just people keep doing other, more ceremonial things, ritualistic things to prevent the listening from happening.
At the end, still, you’ve got to listen to each other, and then find out something that people can live with. By saying my main job and my hobby is to listen, we cut away all those ribbons, rituals, and ceremonies, and get straight to the business. That’s my hobby.
I remember reading through all those child raising books my parents purchased when I was five or six. They were very into education, so they bought a lot of books on education, philosophy, practice, and so on.
I remember when I was five or so, I really resonated with one of the books. I forgot the name of the book. It’s a book on the technique of active listening. Basically, not just listen, but empathize, and to basically co-create a horizon, a way of thinking, a perspective as part of listening.
It stressed that listening is what’s happening, and we’re just vehicles for it. It’s a very non-individualistic view on the art of the listening. I remember finding it really intriguing, and something that I can practice. It’s like playing a piano.
It’s not something magical. It’s just something you do. That’s it, perhaps. I learned it from a book. It’s just how it is, yeah.
That’s right.
There’s an equalizing force.
Quite a few, actually. I am frequently invited to give talks to maybe 300 people, 500 people, 1,000 people. At that point, it’s impossible in our small wetware brain to track where every person is looking at, which emotional state they are.
The best facilitators can maybe do 50 people. Beyond that, it’s possible to keep track individually where everybody is at, and what everybody’s views about everybody is. It’s just combinational explosion.
I use a set of what we call ambient computing, or COM technology -- there is many words for this -- that basically says, "We’re using technology not to distract, but to do the real converse, to let us focus more."
For example, I will use their phones, because by far, when there is 500 people, at any time, 100 people of them are on their phones nowadays. It’s like a natural distractor. Whenever there is a large group meeting, people are just taking their phones out and checking their email for no apparent reason. It also influence people close to them.
Around them. You have those little pockets of people checking Twitter in the middle of a session. Those apps are designed by the best minds that reinforce those short term, instant gratification. There really is no point in trying to compete with the red, small numbers on their screens.
One technique I always use is to tell at the very beginning everyone to take out their phone, and connect to this website, slido.com, and just write down anything on their mind. Anything they want to ask me, anything they want to tell a joke, somebody would want to say to a group.
Because everybody is taking out their phone and doing that, I am essentially occupying their phone, so they are not doing anything else. They are basically using this as a way to communicate. Then I will bring out this projector, project the people’s voices on their phones to the large projector, and ask people to like anything that they want me to answer first.
Basically, this co-opted people’s reflex to press like. They would not to go to Facebook on their phones. They will just use this.
It is just a lot of psychological gimmicks.
Right, exactly. Then I gave this binding power to things like, people ask me a question. Maybe I’ll just throw in a few silly ones. It’s all anonymous. People feel it’s OK, and just give binding power.
If out of 500 people, 100 press like to a very silly question, I will highlight that question, and answer that. Basically, it’s me engaging with the crowd, but the crowd synthesized as, perhaps, one person. It’s conversation with the crowd.
It’s called Slido, S-L-I-D-O.
I think being anonymous is a key part of it. If it’s taking raising a hand, even in very liberal circles, like when around five people, everybody can raise their hands. If 500, it’s very difficult for people to, especially more introvert people, to raise their hands and ask a question, even if they have a lot to contribute.
In government settings, if there are superiors in the same room, it takes even more courage. If everybody is anonymous, and half of people are looking at their phones, you don’t really know who was the person who asked this question, or who raised this sentiment.
That really helps. Slido, or Pol.is, or Vmesh, or Join, all platforms, RealtimeBoard, all these platforms that I use to facilitate group listening, they have one common thing, is they don’t let participant reply to one another.
That just consumes people’s energy to more narrower and narrower conversations. In all those tech that I use, the only way to refute a argument, really, is to raise a better argument. There is no ad hominem attacks, or things like that. It takes some design.
OK. IMED.
You can send me the link, and I will check it out.
Yeah, I’ll look over it.
