Many have attempted to identify the skills important for a learner today in this era of the 21st century (I know it is an overused phrase). I have an affinity towards the skills identified by Tony...
Beth Dichter's insight:
We hear the words 21st century skills and as educators we know how the Common Core is defining those skills, but what are others saying? This post explores a range of ideas that have been put forth as 21st century skills. Gerstein begins with a look at the skills identified by Tony Wagner. This overview is followed by a slideshow put out by Gallup called "The Economics of Human Development: The Path to Winning Again in Education." This is follwed by a look at six "skills and attributes (that) would serve the learners (of all ages) in this era of learning."
"Common myths about education data - its definition, its novelty, what it takes to make it useful - keep us stuck in place when it comes to driving systematic, scalable improvements in students' outcomes. Defusing those myths is critical to achieving progress for teachers and kids."
The concept of personalizing education has received more attention recently. In this post, Justin Reich explores the idea of personization and how it may impact education, with a focus on what he defines as "Moral #1 - that education for civic purposes cannot be personalized." He will have a second post for "Moral #2 - that (some forms of) personalization will optimize measureable outcomes at the expense of (potentially more important) non-measureable outcomes."
What are your thoughts on the personalization of education?
The National Center on UDL released a report , Universal Design for Learning (UDL): Initiatives on the Move this month (May 2012). This post provides a look at UDL and discusses how it might be incorporated into a flipped classroom. A link to the original report is provides as well as many other resources. If UDL is new to you this is a great overview. If you are interested in flipped classrooms and experiential learning this post looks at both while incorporating UDL.
What would happen if school and real life were more connected? If two days a week you worked with a mentor in a field you were interested in? If students worked with advisers, whoserves as a "coach, mentor, teacher, and friend who guides and supports them in managing their personalized learning plan and Learning Through Internship/Interest placement?"
This post explores this in-depth, looking at a school that is part of the Big Picture Company. One look at education reform that provides a wealth of ideas.
This post is written by a student who chose to drop out of school. Quoting from the article:
"The good news is that it worked. I’ve developed a wide range of interests and skills, with my lifelong field of choice being software. I have a software development job that I love, I have no student debt, and I feel secure about my long-term future...
The bad news is that along the way, I discovered that public schools are not prepared to fairly compete for their students’ attention. This has resulted in a long series of slightly traumatizing events. From the prescription drugging, to the humiliation of being singled out from the rest of my peers, to the threats of litigation, it’s been a long road..."
Read on and allow this article to challenge some notions you may have.
"More than 150 years ago, Massachusetts became the first state to provide all of its citizens access to a free public education. Over the next 66 years, every other state made the same guarantee. The result was a publicly-funded system where, in every American classroom, groups of about 28 students of roughly the same age are taught by one teacher, usually in an 800 square-foot room. This model has been the dominant archetype ever since."
So what needs to be done to change this model, to move from the 19th century to the 21st century? This article explores what may be "the future of the classroom?"
So what is critical design literacy and why is it needed? This article states "Critical design literacy applies the protocols of design thinking to practice social innovations that lead to social transformation. In the learning environments that we will pilot we want students to become literate in critical thinking and critical designing. The former encourages students to look at their community through an inquisitive lens while the latter encourages students to design for community impact."
Points on how to practice digital literacy, a look at how to redesign K-12 environments and designing for equity are also discussed.
"As criticism of No Child Left Behind and the associated tests rises, we are hearing more and more about the Common Core Standards (CCS), the next great thing that is supposed to fix all that ails us...
Arne Duncan, likewise, when pushed about our obsession with standardized tests, offers up the Common Core, and the new tests being designed with Department of Education funding, as the solution. According to him, we will soon move "beyond the bubble tests," into a new generation of assessments...
But the Common Core is facing significant pushback, especially from state-level policymakers..."
As you continue to read this article it does appear that the iniatives that many states are undertaking, the adoption of Common Core, the Race to the Top, lead to high stake testing that will happen in more grades and more subjects as time goes on. In a short period of time the testing is scheduled to become computer-based, which will bring machines grading tests.
So where is localism in this discussion. After a short review of how we have gotten to this point Andrew Cody shares an interview he had with Nebraska Education Commissioner Doug Christensen as well as comments from Yong Zhao. This is a fascinating read with information that may make you look at these issues with new insights.
"I’ve said it before; I’ve never taught a perfect lesson...I want to know what works and what doesn’t. Like my students, I thrive on feedback. So evaluate me, please. But let’s lay down a few ground rules.
* I teach children, not targets or standards, so please don’t walk into my classroom expecting to see me teaching a specific skill at an exact moment in time. That’s not how it works here...."
"If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled “education reform movement.” As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They’ve gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers’ unions."
Having children causes one to (re)think seriously about education and the role of school. Education obviously is the most powerful thing in the world. And yet the old Mark Twain chestnut — "I never let school get in the way...
What is schools today were completely changed? In February 20 people met for "an intense consultative session in which we worked to come up with a revolutionary vision for public education...the session has inspired a manifesto that poses this radical concept: 'School isn't school. It is the birthplace of the citizen ideal.'" (http://www.good.is/post/what-if-schools-weren-t-schools-anymore)
This article provides a more detailed description of the session and a place where you can input your vision...could school become "the place where we’re inspired to forget ourselves and become aware of the hopes and needs of somebody else—our neighbors, other citizens."
"Having essential questions drive curriculum and learning has become core to many educators' instructional practices. Grant Wiggins, in his work on Understanding By Design, describes an essential quetion as:
A meaning of “essential” involves important questions that recur throughout one’s life. Such questions are broad in scope and timeless by nature. They are perpetually arguable – What is justice? Is art a matter of taste or principles? How far should we tamper with our own biology and chemistry? Is science compatible with religion? Is an author’s view privileged in determining the meaning of a text? We may arrive at or be helped to grasp understandings for these questions, but we soon learn that answers to them are invariably provisional..."
Beth Dichter's insight:
Why should we teach students to develop their own essential questions? Perhaps because they may be able to develop questions that are engaging and of interest to them. Gerstein explores this issue by sharing a variety of resources that look at question, including Jamie McKenzie who describes "what actually happens in most schools and classrooms in terms of questioning", Paul Harris who "argues that questions occupy a more central role than we realize in childhood cognitive development", and others.
In addition there is information on how to help students generate their own essential questions (additional information in the post):
* Begin a New Unit with Students Developing Questions
* Create a Taxonomy of Questions
* Ask Students to Create Questions as Homework
She also shares information on the QFT (Question Formulation Technique) which has six steps, beginning with "Teacher Design a Question Focus" and immediately moves to "Students Produce Questions" and then to "Students Improve Question" and finishes with "Students Reflect on What they have Learned." For more information (and steps 4 and 5) check out the post!
So true... I cringe when I am in classrooms with the packaged program "essential question" of the week on the board...and very often those "essential questions" lack cognitive clarity for the students
A great summary of why questioning still matters. We've been talking about metacognition a lot this year in the library. Learning how to develop questions is a large part of learning how you learn and think.
This quote is so true. Learning how to ask essential questions is a skill that we can carry with us for the rest of our lives and facilitates a lifetime of learning.
Data is big in education today and it appears to be the driving force behind school reform. Today I was exploring the Michael &Susan Dell Foundation and discovered a series of articles they are running that looks at 10 education data myths. This post is an overview of the series they are running. A list of the 10 education myths is below, but you may want to spend some time of this site exploring materials that are available to school districts that help teachers access and use data to plan daily lesson, help students achieve goals, have productive conversations with parents, identify trends and collaborate with collegues.
So what are those myths?
1. Data = test scores
2. Data-driven instruction is a new concept
3. Data-rich is the same as data-driven
4. Software = The solution
5. Teachers are just data consumers
6. More data creates more work for teachers
7. Tools alone lead to student growth
8. Test data is a good tool for evaluating teachers
"The most impressive technology-rich classrooms don't look like classrooms. Instead, they look like creative businesses on deadline—like advertising agencies pulling together a big campaign, architectural firms drawing up blueprints, or software companies developing new programs."
So, what would a new school look like? Reich compares schools to a "creative agency" where "enable students to collaborate with peers, pursue their interests, publish their work to the world, and take greater responsibility for their own learning."
"Our high schools are relics of the past. Based on an antiquated economic formula designed for the Industrial Revolution, high schools in the United States and Canada are ill-suited for the emotional and intellectual well-being of our young people and profoundly out of step with the needs of our contemporary economy. We have been tinkering with the high school formula for decades, but the recipe for innovation has yet to be written...
We need to revolutionize our basic high school structures: We need to tear apart the school day, the high school timetable, the school year, the four-year diploma..."
What if we really looked at education in a new way? There are schools that are doing this, and being quite successful. This article looks at some emerging modesl that may help us change our schools.
"As a result of inhabiting a different world than teachers, policymakers make a consequential error. They and a cadre of influentials confuse teacher quality with teaching quality, that is, the personal traits of teachers—dedicated, caring, gregarious, intellectually curious—produce student learning rather than the classroom and school settings. Both are important, of course, but policymakers and their influential camp followers have accentuated personal traits far more than the organizational and social context in which teachers teach daily. So if students score low on tests, then who the teachers are, their personal traits, credentials, and attitudes come under close scrutiny, rather than the age-graded school, neighborhood demography, workplace conditions, and resources that support teaching. The person overshadows the place.[i]"
This article goes on to explore the concept of quality teaching (and teaching quality), what is good teaching, what is successful teaching, and more. There is more to consider as we look at these issues than meets the eye.
"This post includes a number of wonderings . . . For the past few days, there has been some controversy over a TED talk that included some commentary about classism...The basic premise was that the talk was censored from public viewing due to it being offensive to the wealthy folks that pay to attend the TED conference."
Gerstein goes on to raise a number of questions we should consider, such as is "the digital divide...an intellectual or pedagogical one" and what schools are using/sharing the new Ted-Ed Lessons Worth Sharing? Great questions to ponder.
If we want American kids to compete and thrive in today's world, then re-imagining the school day needs to be something we each take up as a cause -- in our own schools, in our own towns, and all across the country.
The video is at the end of the article...and it shows one way we could re-imagine the school day...I would ask how many other ways could we also re-imagine a school day?
Today's mandates for special-needs students set schools up for lawsuits, conflict with No Child Left Behind requirements, and waste taxpayers' money. Here are some alternatives.
College was designed to prepare students for a 20th-century economy, and it’s not catching up fast enough to the realities of the modern world. How can we overhaul the entire system?
"Khan Academy and the new Ted-Ed website are being touted to create an educational revolution. What I am concerned about is the underlying pedagogy of Ted-Ed and Khan Academy. I love listening to a good talk and talking about it afterwards, but does it change my thoughts and/or behavior? Typically not. Grant Wiggins’ recent post, 'Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really' discusses this point:
The point of learning is not just to know things but to be a different person – more mature, more wise, more self-disciplined, more effective, and more productive in the broadest sense."
So one question to consider, are the videos the core of instruction, or are teachers (live and in person) the core? Gernstein provides many resources in this article and raises many interesting points as this question is explored.
A while back I scooped two posts from Grant Wiggins, "Everything You Know About Curriculum May Be Wrong. Really." and "Rethinking Curriculum Writing, Part 2." This post is Wiggin's response to replies he received on the two posts mentioned above.
A variety of issues are raised and addressed. He discusses Problem Based Learning (PBL) stating "many PBL courses are quite weak in the sequencing of problems and the lack of focus on transfer. Similarly, Project-based learning is often haphazard and poorly-designed: it often is just a bunch of random projects in no particular sequence..."
He also brings up the Understanding by Design and describes how you can take diverse subject matter and create amazing results.
If you read the first of this series I would urge you to read this post, and if you have not, search on Grant Wiggins and you can find his first two essays on Curriculum.
At the DML Conference in San Francisco back in March, Doug Belshaw (co-kickstarter) of Purpos/ed contributed an Ignite talk on 'Why we need a debate about the purpose(s) of education.' A short talk (~5 minutes) with images that will raise questions in your mind.
You can add your voice to this dialogue at the website Purpos/ed: http://purposed.org.uk/
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