100Voices: a school for flourishing and survival

At the last meeting we agreed the three driving principles of our new education imaginary. We want learning in the Carolean era to be built on:

• purpose-driven learning

• mutualism

• communal knowledge

In this post I want to share our ideas for the third strand: Communal Knowledge.

Knowledge vs skills

It has always frustrated us that knowledge is so often spoken of as the binary opposite of skills, especially in relation to curricula. This is a deeply flawed position and does a disservice to both while missing an important opportunity to do something truly transformational for learners, learning and assessment. In this post I would like to present our proposal for a new model which we have called Communal Knowledge. It seeks to articulate an ambitious and expanded vision drawing together a number of important activities and processes into a coherent approach that will truly liberate learners and learning. Communal Knowledge is predicated on a particular understanding of what knowledge actually is.

What is knowledge?

Instead of knowledge enjoying equivalence with skills and understanding, we subscribe to a definition that places knowledge itself at the apex; a pediment supported on three pillars:

• information and facts

• skills

• experiences.

In this imaginary, knowledge is the product of all our endeavours as humans whether through formal or informal learning; in school, at home, in the community; whether it is for serious purposes or for fun. We believe that the sum total of any and all activity is knowledge. It becomes communal when we share it, and we share it because it benefits us all to do so.

Communal knowledge

In the diagram below, you can see that Communal Knowledge sits at the centre of an expanded network built on a constellation of disks or ‘pies’ each of which is divided into three segments. The notion of threes came from our vision statement which was built around three statements. We found this pleasing to say and easy to remember, so it was adopted for the same reason.

So the central pie - Communal Knowledge - is divided into three:

• Understanding Knowledge

• Sharing and Exchanging Knowledge

• Assessing Knowledge

Each of these links out to a new pie where the subdivision into thirds is repeated, unpacking the new headline statement.

Assessing knowledge

While Sharing and Exchanging Knowledge is core to the big vision for Communal Knowledge, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the Principles pie. In some ways, this is the most radical as it seeks to establish three new principles for assessment:

• Dependence to Independence

• Assessing only what is Reliable, Valuable, Worthwhile

• Peer Moderated

We feel that so much bandwidth to given to the exhausting range of activities drawn together under the banner of assessment that there is much to be gained by clarifying its remit (and restricting its spread) by holding it to three principles. The first is surely the journey we seek for all our young people. The second is an ethical position that will ensure the process enjoys an uncontestable position in the work we do while avoiding mission creep. And the third we are all really excited about because to do it properly means that our youngsters are truly leaders of their own learning*.

Next steps

The Focus pie needs a bit of work: we still need to agree the final list of Global Competencies, and there is some concern about the reappearance of Knowledge in this disk (though these are some of the things we will be assessing within the bounds of the new principles). We are also really excited about the Evidence disk, but this needs further exploration. Onwards and forwards.

*Thanks to Ron Berger and Expeditionary Learning for this