Lifelong Learning in Schools - Living & Breathing or Lip-served?

[Joel Birch]

Greetings Hong-Kolleagues!

This year marks my first foray into the world of secondary teaching. I've noticed a much bigger focus on career path and career education in informal discussions with staff, and a real "later in life" skew to a lot of the whole-school interactions with the kids. Really nice to see - primary schools I've been in have occasionally struck me as being a little bit insular and cotton-wooly, with the notion of lifelong learning an ever-present, but ever-distant goal.

This prompted me to take a look at ways I can introduce real-world, lifelong learning skills into my everyday teaching and learning program. By Year 8, the students I'm working with this year have the maturity and the independence to be able to throw themselves at some online resources through facilities such as the iTunes Podcast Store/iTunes U, instructables.com, YouTube, and the plethora of web user forums for every skill under the sun, and come out the other side with some worthwhile leads to follow. It also struck me that at this age, they have the foundations of the social skills to begin building a heavily scaffolded, structured, and mentor-guided network of useful contacts. I can begin putting this list together through my own network of contacts, with the very firm warning that this initial batch of professionals is my contact network giving up their time to assist and offer mentoring, so the students must be prepared, focussed, and motivated if professional assistance is to be sought.

We're beginning a pilot project with two classes in our school to give those students the opportunity to engage in some self-directed, career-focussed, skills-based learning. We're anchoring it to our Virtues/Values program, asking that the students complete a reflective journal each week, identifying the virtues they needed to display in achieving the goals that they had set for the week. As a sample of the skills students have opted to learn, we have students attempting animation, clothing design, landscape architecture, web design, French, Indonesian, photography, filmmaking, learning guitar, and performing illusions.

Australian schools love talking about lifelong learning, so I thought I'd tackle it and do something explicit about it. How about in Hong Kong?

Thoughts? Comments?

Who's got something cool up and running?