Today Indonesian schools have a golden opportunity to undergo a more than cosmetic revamp. The demand for good schools in Indonesia has perhaps never been higher. Furthermore, the demands of the new workplace has also changed and parents and employers want schools to produce people who will display the characteristics of the workforce of the future. In my last posting I have argued that it is important that schools in Indonesia should adopt a model where thinking and deep understanding takes center stage in the school curriculum. I have also suggested that the Smart School model adopted by David Perkins be given a serious look and that Indonesia should not settle for school curricula that is very high stakes examination-oriented.

In that first posting, I have explained a key principle of Perkins’ Smart School concept, which was generative knowledge. A school that places emphasis on generative knowledge would have to look beyond the teaching of meaningless rote learning of facts and routines. It would mean that a serious look be given to what ought to be taught. Here lies the challenge for the teachers. Would the teachers be willing to design their own syllabus as to what is to be taught, how it is to be taught, what is to be assessed and how it is to be assessed? It would require work on curriculum mapping instead of just adopting what an international examinations syndicate gives you. The curriculum would have to be mapped out to ascertain what would be taught. Schools thinking of going in this direction should seriously look at whether their teachers are prepared to put in the time for such work. They also need to see if the teachers need to undergo further training or professional development. It also implies the schools would have to have more intelligent teachers.

Another key principle of the Smart School is learnable intelligence. The Smart School stands on the belief that students can and do learn ways of thinking that can boost their performance. This view stems from the research done by Perkins and his colleagues in Harvard’s Project Zero. This contrasts with the traditional view about intelligence being a fixed quantity. Other studies also have supported this view of intelligence.

However, inteliigence can only be boosted if the teachers in the school adopt a more rigorous teaching approach that requires the integration of the teaching of higher order thinking skills. The teachers would also need to adopt an approach of teaching that calls for the use of careful scaffolding. Scaffolding is important because it guides students to develop their own thinking processes. With the guidance through scaffolding, students will learn to see that they have a more accurate picture of their own abilities and potentials and how they learn.

For most schools in Indonesia (and even in Singapore), this will represent a tectonic shift. Schools chasing high stakes examinations syllabus will have great difficulty meeting this most basic demand of the Smart School. Such schools will always be short of time and racing to complete the syllabus in time for the examinations. Secondly, it would also often mean that teachers in such schools will only teach to the examinations. All else will be unimportant because the only real assessment of learning is only done at such examinations. But schools that move in the direction of the Smart School model, including schools aspiring to be SBIs, will be a school that is truly serious about student learning and very importantly, in such a school, every student will be valued because here, truly, it is believed that every child can learn.

Indonesia today is experiencing a rapid growth in the number of international schools and what is termed, the National Plus schools. The rapid increase in the numbers of these schools in Indonesia reflects the desire of many Indonesian parents to give the best possible education to their children. These schools usually have their students sitting for high stakes international examinations like the IGCSE or the local UASBN. Recently, more schools are following the much touted Singapore model. This is done usually through an almost simplistic wholesale transfer of the typical Singapore school system to the Indonesian schools.

In addition to these, there has also been an increased clamor for schools to acquire Sekolah Berstandar Internasional (SBI) status. These are essentially schools populated by Indonesian teachers and possessing an Indonesian curriculum but with standards that match that of what is thought to be the standards of international schools in terms of facilities and the manner of the teaching and learning that takes place. But even then, there is no real agreement as to what constitutes an SBI.

Despite the seeming confusion, this period actually offers Indonesia a golden opportunity to explore alternative school models. One such model is the model of a Smart School as propounded by David Perkins of Harvard University. In Perkins’ model, thinking and understanding takes center stage in the learning processes in the school. This would produce students who are responsible and also thinking people who can contribute to a diverse world.

The Smart School (click on picture on left) as envisage by Perkins would have a clear idea of what knowledge or skill is worth learning and this would be based on the idea that education is about the teaching for understanding. It would be a shift from the largely rote-learning approach of most schools today which is the result of a teaching approach that is aimed at the examinations.  A student that is the product of this Smart School would be intellectually empowered because he would have been immersed in a thinking culture in his time in the school. He would be able to think critically, flexibly and deeply after they have left school. This means that his learning will not be surface learning that only allows him to be exam smart. The product of the Smart School would be able to display generative knowledge which means that they are able to retain knowledge for the long-term and not just for the examinations; they have an understanding of knowledge; and that they would be able to use the knowledge that they have beyond the classrooms.

In a Smart School, therefore, students would not be engaged in what Perkins calls meaningless trivial pursuit of information where learning is just the amassing of huge chunks of facts and routines, and the teacher is concerned with the teaching of quantity rather than depth. In his Trivial Pursuit Theory, Perkins also argues that the information would be truncated, disjointed and meaningless.

If we look at the goals set by Perkins for his Smart School, they are goals which I am confident anyone would agree with. If we just look at the rising voices of unhappiness with the current school systems in Singapore and also Indonesia, one of the loudest complaints is the over-emphasis on remembering and regurgitating huge chunks of facts and routines. Parents know that a lot of what is forced on the memory of their children will have little relevance later. Much of what is learned is seldom applied in the lives of their children later.

Parents (and employers too) should seek a serious change in the way schools go about their business of teaching. They should also realize that the number one reason why schools today on the whole still emphasize the meaningless memorizing of facts and routines is due to the high stakes examination system that has been adopted by schools. If there is this realization, parents should think carefully about seeking schools whose main goal is to prepare their students for such examinations because when this is the goal usually deep understanding is sacrificed. The end result in such school systems is that there is usually only a pretense at education. Worse, these schools give the ignorant a false sense of security that real teaching and learning is taking place. The good news is that this does not have to happen.

Too often, when we talk about the kind of curriculum we want, we tend to think in terms of the high stakes examinations that the students will be sitting for. This is perhaps quite natural because, high stakes examinations, like the GCE, IGCSE and IB, are usually well-known and perhaps give academic credibility to the students and schools concerned. They also come with fixed curricula which means that the schools would not have to design a curriculum from scratch. That alone is a major factor perhaps because schools choose the road to high stakes examinations because it is a relatively quick way to “excellence”.

Schools in Indonesia have been heading in this direction. As a Jakarta Post report said, the sharp decline in the value of the rupiah have meant that Indonesian parents, who would have otherwise sent their young charges overseas, now prefer sending them to the mushrooming number of international schools in Indonesia. Many of these schools rely on high stakes examinations to give them academic credibility.

However, whether high stakes examinations can actually lead to excellence is open to debate (see here, here and here for examples of the debate over high stakes examinations). I will not be debating the merits or otherwise of high stakes examinations. What is more important perhaps is too see what kind of students our schools today have to produce. I will therefore refer again to the same RAND report that I had quoted in an earlier post. In this same report it said:

“…the skills of the workforce will increasingly be the defining characteristic that determines the extent to which an economy can develop and exploit new technologies and compete in the global marketplace. A highly skilled workforce will be needed to realize and take advantage of change in IT, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. The shift in organizational forms and the nature of employment relationships also favor strong cognitive and entrepreneurial skills. For example, … knowledge workers require high-level cognitive skills for managing, interpreting, validating, transforming, communicating, and acting on information. Valued skills include such non-routine analytic skills as abstract reasoning, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. Workers with these skills can perform tasks that require higher-skill human action not easily codified into computer software.”

The skills indicated above surely demands that school seriously think (or re-think as the case may be) how the teaching and learning is to take place in the school. The typical high stakes examination curricula that has been adopted by many schools may have worked for an industrial system of the late 19th and 20th century. The 21st century demands a very set of workers and therefore different teaching and learning goals and approaches.

A school that intends to produce the workforce of the 21st century should place a heavy emphasis on understanding. The passing or even the acing of high stakes examinations does not mean that a student has understood what he has learned in school. David Perkins argued that teaching of understanding should be pursued. He said:

“Knowledge and skill in themselves do not guarantee understanding. People can acquire knowledge and routine skills without understanding their basis or when to use them. And, by and large, knowledge and skills that are not understood do students little good! What use can students make of the history or mathematics they have learned unless they have understood it?”

- “Teaching for Understanding” by David Perkins

Perkins has written about the Smart School, his conception of a school that would pursue the need for understanding. The Smart School is guided by seven key principles. These principles are guided or underpinned by two beliefs. The first is that, learning is a consequence of thinking, and good thinking is learnable by all students. Secondly, learning should include deep understanding, which involves the flexible, active use of knowledge. It is because deep understanding “involves the flexible, active use of knowledge” that it becomes vital for school to seriously consider Perkins’ proposal. To be flexible and use knowledge actively is to dive into the unknown as opposed to going back to what is already known. This understanding is so important because it allows for real application and re-assessment of concepts already learned.  It is this flexible and active use of knowledge which is the hallmark of the worker of the 21st century.