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Model Secondary Schools Project Working with schools and districts to ensure our urban students have the 21st Century schools they deserve. |
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21st Century Learning |
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We are well into the much anticipated 21st Century. We appear to be passing though the final stages of setting graduation standards and moving on to the more daunting task of holding school accountable for achieving those standards. An underlying conflict, on which there often appears to be common agreement, though not clearly reflected in the content standards, lies in the thinking and process skills that form the core of what is being called 21st Century learning. The conflict lies not so much in the standards themselves – the thinking skills are embedded as the standards cannot be adequately met without them - but rather in trying to define assessing the standards as measuring either content mastery or skill mastery when it is both. Keep in mind that assessment is a messy science – while we can measure things with great accuracy using a broad array of measurement techniques and instruments – the things we are measuring – skill and content knowledge- keeps shifting and changing – event the act of assessing gives the flexible and wily brain the opportunity to delve into possible linkages and form new synapses. If education continues to be driven by the industrial model still dominant in schools - measuring our ability to manage the delivery of boxed curriculum – we will continue to be faced with making decisions based on old models. Today, the tools we use everyday have more power and flexibility than anything available to even the rarest techno geeks and scientists twenty years ago. What skills does a sixth grader need today? Many may be the skills we struggled with in graduate school – the ability to sort and organize information, the ability to see connections between references that may have different source media, the ability to sift through information applying context filters to identify potentially valuable information. Imagine being able to gather a collection of articles, reference materials, and data, organize it by key words, then search through it by clicking a visual display of the most common references – the frequency of the reference being indicated by the size of the text. Imagine being able to do this at no fiscal cost other than the time to figure out how you can save yourself time and expand your capacity by using the tool. Right now, that 6th grader can do all this using free online tools from del.icio.us (http://delicious.com/) . Moving urban schools into the 21st Century is the greatest challenge we face today in education. While we as adults are challenged to understand the functions and build the habits to use the rapidly growing wealth of tools known as Web 2.0, our students are using them regularly, networking with others, sharing resources and ideas, contributing to building online knowledge bases, communicating with others around the world – with no consideration of the traditional barriers we have faced in such endeavors - long distance phone bills, travel costs, language and culture barriers. While the costs and many of the barriers are still there, the tools have broken them down to the point where a twelve year old with Internet access is able cross those boundaries almost at will. The implications for what and how we teach are tremendous. Ten years ago we lead the start-up of an online school, one of only a few existing at the time. We found the opportunity to break down the walls of traditional approaches to teaching to be both challenging and inspiring. In just ten years much has changed, yet schools today still struggle with changing the practices of school operation built to meet the dual needs of an agrarian and industrial society. While students need contact with adult models the time and space constraints of the past, and the linear delivery and assessment of content knowledge is out of sync with the social patterns of today. This challenge defines much of the work we face in the coming years. |
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A Link Cloud from del.icio.us |
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"The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." —Alvin Toffler |
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Resources |
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Mailing Address: Model Secondary Schools Project, LLC PO Box 1684 Bellevue, WA 98009-1684
Fax: 888-734-7304 |
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Contact Information |
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After a reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (http://malcolmgladwell.com/outliers/index.html) we developed the following as discussion starters for getting to the heart of this conversation: Outcome: A 21st Century Learning Organization that prepares youth for a healthy life, engages them in building and maintaining a healthy community, and is characterized by continuous learning and personal success. Core strategies: · Change the ways we make use of time by removing barriers based in the agrarian and industrial calendar · Shift Instructional outcomes and practices while ramping up expectations to Global Achievement Standards · Create an intentional learning culture and extensive learning community that reaches beyond the traditional boundaries of schooling Tactics: · Engage the whole spectrum of adults in the educational community in organizational collaboration to support, enrich and extend student collaboration · Increase organizational capacity to make optimum use of traditional school time and extended learning time · Leverage the value of informal learning and social networks into guided instructional efforts to meet higher standards · Improve organizational capacity to utilize real time information to act strategically |
