Teachers up in clouds to let students open wings
Lessons learned with Air Force will change classrooms forever
Students focused just on good academic grades are in for a big shock in
40 New Zealand classrooms. Teachers have spent this week at the Whenuapai air base doing practical things such as planning and executing a search and rescue mission at sea. They have met entrepreneurs, programmers, scientists and technologists who work in the Air Force.
Their classrooms will never be the same again.
The “School to Skies” educational internship week was organised by 21C Skills Lab, an Auckland-based social enterprise aiming to transform education by developing the skills needed for 21st-century work, such as teamwork, entrepreneurship, creativity, resilience and “design thinking”.
This year it teamed up with the Royal NZ Air Force, which has run School to Skies camps as a recruitment initiative for Year 13 girls in the Easter school holidays since 2017.
Flight Lieutenant Natalie Pitts, who leads that programme, says the natural next step was to “influence the influencers” — teachers who can nudge students towards careers in technical fields such as the Air Force.
21C Skills Lab director Justine Munro, a serial social entrepreneur who founded the NZ Centre for Social Innovation, says the Air Force employs people in a range of technical fields and can show teachers how they all collaborate on exercises such as a search and rescue mission.
“They are all just soaking up the culture here. They have all noticed so much about teamwork, collaboration, resilience,” she says. “We are also giving them an overview of the future of work. We want to blow their minds.”
The teachers worked collaboratively to plan not just a search and rescue mission but also “learning experiences” for their own classes, which they pitched, Dragons’ Den-style, to a panel featuring Microsoft’s Dan Walker at the end of the week.
Stephan Van Haren, a physics and robotics teacher at St Peter’s College in Palmerston North, plans to use a school drone bought for sports training to track and find a parcel or a person on the street.
Sarah Lovell, who teaches new entrants at Otatara Primary School near Invercargill, plans to get her
5-year-olds interested in science and technology through play.
Young Lee, who teaches Years 7 to
9 at Catholic Cathedral College in Christchurch, intends to break the narrow academic stranglehold that his students have been caught in even by age 11 or 12.
“Students just think grades are the way to success. Here they teach you that collaboration, working together, is the way to success,” he says.
Lee, who is only in his second year of teaching, worries that only the students who are “perceived to be smart” answer his questions.
“The person who thinks they can’t contribute will stay quiet,” he says.
“The students that are not answering are not engaging. They just think the smart students should do the work.
“They just have so much potential within themselves but don’t know how to share because they are not given work to do.”
Equally: “The students that are perceived to be smart just want to do the work by themselves, they don’t want to know how the other students think.
“For them, it’s all about understanding
My job is to go back to my classroom to make everyone accountable and students know that they can rely on each other.
Young Lee, teacher
different ideas — there are no really one-way answers.”
Lee was inspired by planning the search and rescue mission.
“We were given co-ordinates and instructions, real-life-based activity that pilots do. We had a problem and had to use physics and maths to solve it.
“What I loved about it was that it was group work and within that group everyone had a certain role,” he says.
“Now my job is to go back to my classroom to make everyone accountable and students know that they can rely on each other. If they rely on each other, the collaboration work will be successful.”
James Riley, a teacher at Douglas Park Primary School in Masterton, says his school used to be focused narrowly on reading, writing and maths, but it didn’t work for many children.
“If they were not succeeding in reading, writing and maths, they were feeling like failures,” he says.
Three years ago a new principal introduced a “maker culture” — encouraging children to learn by making things physically.
“For example, this year we did earth science. The kids were asked to show what they learned during the unit by building something. Some of them made models to show the sun, the Earth and the moon,” Riley says.
“This was capturing those 60 per cent that could do a whole lot better, and making them well-rounded.”
At Whenuapai, Riley has been inspired to see the range of jobs “that the kids need to see and experience, so that if two kids hook into something, that might keep them going for the next six months”.
He was excited to hear entrepreneurs talk about what they could do in New Zealand.
“They were just inspirational in a way that gives you energy as a teacher,” he says.
“Hearing from those people saying, give us some great kids and we can do these amazing things, it smacks the pipes and knocks the rust off and the water runs clear.”