For the past several years, the "Information Technology Era" has framed many of the challenges of the day in schools and workplaces. But I'd like to contend that we've breezed through the Information Technology Era and have arrived at a new period, which I call the "Learning Era."
To begin, let's consider two forces that have been at work in the world over the past several years. First, there's a new focus on assessment and data in schools and in the workplace. In education, much of the assessment work is a result of educators' attempts to determine what students have learned after exposure to a certain amount of new information. Assessment, then, is not about the students' future as much as it's about understanding their past. Even the legislative intention of large-scale assessment is about past learning.
In the business world, the equivalent of our educational assessment model includes accounting for number of sales, returns, product cost, and so on, but here again the focus is on the past.
Whether in schools or in the workplace, my point is that if you don't learn from the data and use the information to inform future actions, assessment has little more than historic value.
The second force at work that makes me believe we are in the Learning Era is the rapid pace of change and the exponential growth of information that we have been experiencing. In his book The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand illustrates the rapid change and growth of information when he reminds us that each U.S. president leaves behind more information for his library than all the previous ones combined.
What does this mean for future generations? Is it possible for us to characterize what will be essential for future generations to know and be able to do? I don't think so. That's why I believe the ability to learn far outranks the ability to store knowledge in one's memory to recite or express in an assessment. Learning and the ability to learn are central to living and working successfully today and in the future.
Yet if you follow news reports on state and federal legislatures' actions, you would think we've gone from the Information Technology Era into the "Assessment Era," where measurement against a standard system of ranking and sorting is all-encompassing. Although assessment may be a critical piece of the Learning Era, making it the central focus and "end" of an educator's work can obscure its real role of informing future actions.
Despite such misconceptions about how to best use assessments in the Learning Era, a new emphasis on learning is great news for educators because no one knows about learning better than educators. Good educators know that learning is different from teaching: learning is about the individual and creating in him or her a sense of what it means to learn.
For example, on a recent trip to London I met a group of educators who were ensuring that the children they were teaching understood their own learning. They were teaching the children to take control of their learning by asking more questions when they didn't understand a point being made during an instructional moment. They reassured the students that learning was an interactive process between them and the teacher, and that asking questions when they did not understand initial teaching was perfectly acceptable in a learning environment. These teachers also taught the students that collaboration and failing to have the right answer were perfectly normal activities in the process of learning.
As educational leaders in this Learning Era, we have the task of ensuring that students understand the different responsibilities they have in learning, such as asking questions and sharing their individual needs as learners. For their part, educators need to understand the different abilities, experiences, and knowledge that students bring to their learning.
In the end it is all about learning—not teaching and not assessment. In this world filled with abundant information and changes at lightning speed, the ability to learn is what will matter most in the years ahead.