Parents challenged by Prof Stephen Heppell as he promotes smartphones for 4 yr olds!

This week we were fortunate to have Prof. Stephen Heppell join the M.G.G.S. staff, the students and our parent community for a series of talks designed to challenge our views on the quickly changing education landscape. 

Fortunately for us, Stephen loves Melbourne. He continually reminds us that it's his favourite city in the world and the only city where he owns a bicycle (a 'fixie' bike at that!), so he didn’t hesitate when we invited him back again this year to talk about his experiences and the changes he is seeing in education as he travels the world.

We admire Stephen immensely as an academic who always has an eye on the horizon and with his experience working globally across industries and across education sectors this allows him to have a unique and holistic approach to education and the enormous possibilities for the future. As one staff member said, "I love that he inspires me to do better". We have a philosophy at M.G.G.S. that the girls learning is our priority and all our decisions come back to these central questions, "how will it effect our girls?" "How will it benefit our girls learning?" It is clear throughout Stephen's presentations that he is listening to students and he encourages educators to seek their opinions and learn alongside them.

In the sessions we viewed images of schools, classrooms and libraries from around the world, we discussed technology and furniture in schools and the students in particular were very taken 

with this design, ( at right), which I have vowed to investigate further.

Some of the ideas we discussed were: 

• a conflict resolution table as seen in a Spanish school library 

One of the Student sessions

• a library in Thailand with a climbing wall
• a school with a Skype bar in the back of each classroom
• school toilets and the effects of dehydration on learning
• 'Shoeless' schools- schools with "shoes off"
• we discussed one of our noisy art classrooms and we toyed with a number of creative projects that the girls could be involved in that would assist

•  we discussed the importance of ggrandparents in our student's learning and why schools should be providing them with training on reading and phonetics etc

and as alluded to in my attention seeking headline, parents were challenged to consider:

• that schools in the U.K. are now advertising "large group teaching" 
• providing smart phones to children when they turn 4. 

Prof. Heppell's arguments were sound and certainly sounded logical to me, although immediately as a parent, my reaction to 4 year olds with mobile phones was, "REALLY?"

So in regards to large group teaching he explained that when this was originally implemented in the U.K. in the 70's it was a cost cutting measure. It was done badly and cheaply and in rooms that hadn't been designed to accommodate such numbers. He referred to the open studios at M.G.G.S., which have been purpose built in 2010 and 2011, where the light and noise levels had been well considered, where we are fortunate to have very high teacher:student ratios and where the girls as young as Year 5, leave the space for specialist classes, including science in the same science labs used by the most senior students. Whilst the 'superclasses' Stephen speaks of can be twice the size of ours and often across year levels too, he reminded us to remember that it's important to recognise that a team teaching approach to teaching can bring out the best in people's skills, read more: http://rubble.heppell.net/superclasses/

Finally we come to the elephant in the room that makes everyone nervous; mobiles for 4 year olds!

Firstly this isn't about using a smart phone at all as a phone and Stephen recognises the fact that 4 year old's don't need to be calling anyone, this is not an argument about security or helicopter parenting.

"The debate is not simple. Even what we mean by a phone today is no longer very clear.

Giving a phone to a very young child helps them to understand the different components in their hyper-connected world. Many adults struggle to understand these components and, just as with computers before, that misunderstanding may often be at the heart of damaging "ban and block" prejudice.

The key is not the phone, it is what children do with their phones - passively watching streaming video is not good on a TV set, it is not any better on a phone. Making, doing, problem solving, creating, communicating, talking, txting... in fact anything interactive, contributory or collaborative is helpful.

Games and other media have clear parental guidance about age ratings. It is always important that you observe this guidance."

Read more: http://heppell.net/phones/

I'm sure our parents went home and debated this topic for hours and I'd certainly welcome any comments on this blog post if you feel inclined to join in on this conversation.

Parent session in the evening