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Trends Influencing our New Zealand Education

What?
I realised today that a primary school teacher will spend about 1000 hours a year with a student, this is without any absences from either the teacher or the student. A high school teacher spends only 120 hours a year with a student, without any absence from either side. A parent, at best, will have the opportunity to spend 2860 waking hours with their child. This does not include the time they could have during the holidays.
With all that in mind, the teacher is the person who is asked to ready a child for the future. To prepare them for the world out there and create a lifelong learner.
The OECD (2016) report entitled “Trends Shaping Education” states that we must re-think our teaching profession as well as spend time looking at assessment and the achievement outcomes of our students to create a breed of lifelong learners.
Should this really be our responsibility? So much of raising the lifelong learner is farmed out to coaches, club leaders, medical advisers and technology. When did it stop being PAFT (parents as first teachers) and become everyone else?
Is it really my role to create the lifelong learner?

So what?
Daggart (2014) states that there is growing realisation that preparing a young person for career success requires a higher and different set of academic skills and knowledge.
For our students to be able to meet the demands of what they are likely to face, in their careers, there is a general understanding that educators must move away from teaching their students’ knowledge and look more at developing the skills within them to share what they know. What a massive mantle we are commissioned with. In the hours I am given as a teacher, all this is asked of me. No wonder we are finding it difficult to get secondary school teachers. A New Zealand Curriculum Update (2012) states that a future-oriented education system must be learning centred. Research clearly shows that people do not learn as well as spectators – good learning requires active engagement. As a teacher with about 120 hours of face time with this student, I will do all that I can to create an environment of active engagement. Real active engagement needs to come from more than just the classroom.

Now what?
Maybe the focus should turn the neck towards the parents and whanau? Maybe we should be asking more of them to prepare their tamariki for what is ahead. The New Zealand key competencies are clear and precise. I like them. Imagine if they were embedded in our society and in all aspects.

A key challenge is not what the teachers and schools should be commissioned to do, but what are the families going to do?
Daggett, B. (2014). Addressing Current and Future Challenges in Education. Retrieved from http://www.leadered.com/pdf/2014

Future-oriented learning and teaching.  Retrieved fromhttp://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources/NZC-Updates/Issue-26-October-2012

OECD. (2016) Trends Shaping Education 2016, OECD Publishing, Paris.

Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., Jasper, M. (2001) Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

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