Mark Parkinson, Executive Director and head of the GD Goenka Private School in Sharjah — to open start in September 2013 — promises to redefine education for 21st-century children.
“All that is learnt need not be taught,” says Parkinson, a strong advocate of nurturing the free spirit of children. He believes teachers must teach with passion and creativity and set aside rule setting. Having spent over two decades in leading educational institutions in Asia —including India and Bangladesh — Mark decided to come to Dubai as he feels it is an “incredible place with a real ‘can do’ spirit that is very motivating.” Mark spoke to Education on his innovative ideas.
What are your innovative and creative ideas for education?
I think it is vital to introduce personalised education in all senses of the term. We are not producing clones or assembly-line products or widgets on a table. Each child is different and usually, most schools perpetuate the process of wholesale education. I think our society perpetuates this myth, but in actuality, this has not been working to our benefit. I have worked closely with leading MBA institutions in India and seen that only 30 per cent of the MBAs are actually effective. The rest lack employability skills.
The fault does not rest only with the university level education. There is something missing from the primary source — K-12 education. There is, obviously, something lacking in the learning process of the child that stops him from being effective as he grows into a young adult.
In the US education system, they have introduced the Route 21 concept which is developing learning and teaching skills to prepare for the 21st century and it all begins with K-12 education.
Today, the industry too realises that there are obvious gaps in the K-12 education. Schools need to address this and this is what I mean when I say we need to be innovative and creative. We need to question our teaching techniques and not accept things simply because they have been around for a long time. All stakeholders in education need to be part of this conversation.
Why do educationists resist innovation and change?
Change is a challenge and a problem. Innovation in industry is driven by fear of competition and becoming obsolete. But in schools, that fear of competition is still not real.
At GD Goenka, our key is to shift the focus away from instruction. Right now, classrooms are teacher-centric. A child’s learning process is linear. His learning depends to a large extent on the dynamics of the relationship that exists between the teacher and the child.
Teaching is an art and teachers need to be ranked on the levels of communication, openness and transparency that they practice. Teachers can be very subjective in their analysis and the experiment suggests that trust and leadership starts from the highest levels of self-awareness. There is a need for reflective educators in class.
You believe in relinquishing adult control in schools. How does one achieve that?
The vast majority of schools in the world are still run along lines driven by adult control of children, extraneous motivation and discipline — the carrot and the stick, and driven by interpersonal competition more than collaboration.
To my mind, there is no question that, especially in early years in education environment, there is a need for a great deal more reflection, openness and candour about the ‘adult agenda’ and the ways in which our needs get prioritised over those of children.
Some of the more obvious issues are rigid timetables and schedules driven by bells and adult-centric agendas. The people who believe in the paradigm of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ may not subscribe to the theory of lesser adult control in school. But we have to understand that in the 21st century, we are creating lifelong learners.
The 21st century students are called ‘digital natives’. To what extent does technology play a role in improving the parameters of good educational instruction?
We have to accept the fact that technology is here to stay. However, we must remember that it’s not technology itself that inspires and motivates children — but rather what it potentially enables them to do. If technology facilitates the learning process and is not used as a distraction, it is effective.
How can one make learning more spontaneous and a matter of joy for students?
There should be less learning by rote and more with new techniques such as mind mapping. In an experiment conducted by Stanford University, the researchers were able to indicate that learning had a neurological connection and lighted neural pathways in our brain. There is a process called neurological pruning and just as a tree grows healthier with pruning, our brain goes through the process of axon pruning wherein it sheds extraneous elements to make it more efficient.
Neurologists believe that the human brain goes through pruning several times throughout its lifespan, including several times during childhood and adolescence. During these times, the brain is particularly open to positive interventions. It is a brief window for training the brain and the brain absorbs more efficiently. We must allow the child to view learning as a spontaneous process he or she enjoys and does not have to cram or mug.
When I see some senior school students outside examination halls trying to go feverishly through textbooks as though they want to squeeze in an extra fact at the nth hour, that flies in the face of the learning process.
When students grow into adults, they see learning as something that was largely ‘done’ to them in schools.
I have worked closely with leading management schools and seen that most students do not consider learning as a matter of joy but for the purpose of collection of certificates. The day they obtain all the certificates they need for a job, they stop learning.
As a result, they treat jobs as routine until they are a bit older and they see younger people coming in and doing better than them as the attitudes towards education are changing. The previous generation of students looked at education as obtaining a piece of paper. We need to tell our children that learning or education is not a matter of getting a piece of paper. Teachers can make the difference by establishing a relationship with the students that extends beyond the classroom.
You are not a great supporter of the ‘values-based’ approach to teaching.
I am actually against these current movements where schools celebrate anti-bullying and anti-ragging week. What we are doing is dealing with the symptoms and not the cause. We need to examine the learning experience of the school, the climate of the school and the children.
What makes some children bullies?
What we are doing is encouraging a culture of competitiveness that makes some students less equal than the others. We need to address that.
The UAE has a plethora of Indian schools following a variety of curriculums. What will make your school stand out in the competition?
Our USP is providing holistic education where we give equal weightage to mainstream academics and self development programmes in sports, performing arts, public speaking, etc. I refuse to call these extra-curricular activities or see it as a trade-off to academic achievement.
As educationists, we have to see what are we doing to the students in the context of their longer life. We deliver lessons on the basis of ‘one size fits all’. Then we give remedial classes which eat into the time meant for pursuing art, drama, physical education.
Why can’t we get it right the first time?
When we call these activities extracurricular, we indicate that these are superficial activities. Whereas, success in sports, music, performing arts can give a child lifelong learning skills and self belief that will shape his personality. I intend to have dialogue with parents on the new school scenario hold a seminar with all these facts and tell them about the set of objectives I have and listen to the set of objectives they have.
We will keep a separate orientation for administrative issues such as school timings, bus timings, pick-up, drop off and other facilities which are necessary but have no direct bearing on the quality of education.
We will have orientation purely on the learning experience their child will have at school.
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