“Their Needs” vs. “Our Wants”

Moderating a student panel, I asked the audience to tweet some questions for the students, and one of them had some interesting responses. The audience asked, “Do you see pencil and paper being in schools 10 or 20 years from now?” When I asked the question, the adults in the room and had no idea where the students were going to go with the question.
One of the responses from the students was basically, “how could you predict what devices, pencils or otherwise, that will be in schools 10 years from now when it is hard to tell what will be using in a couple of years?” I thought this was a great perspective and a great counter argument to the boards that spend significant amounts of time discussing what school will look like in 2030. Tools and access to information changes a lot because it is so interconnected to learning. It reminded me that we often spend so much time planning for a future that we cannot predict, that we often forget the kids in our school presently. I don’t think too many grade ten students are worried about school in 2030; they are thinking about what school looks like now.
Another response to the question from a student was basically that as long as kids need them and have different learning styles, they should be in the classroom. I thought it was such a great point and it was a student focused answer, which ours should be as well. On one hand, you have a lot of people saying that we should not have technology in school for a myriad of reasons, but on the other hand, there is a lot of people that would rather see every kid have a device. The student reminded me that both approaches are wrong. Our approach should be focused on what (individual) students need, not what we want them to have.
There is so much we can learn about the direction of our schools now if we are not only willing to listen to our students, but act on what they tell us.