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Shifting concentrations…
March 5, 2008 | 1 Comment
School is an interesting place when no teachers or students are present. It’s Spring Break in our part of the country (although spring doesn’t seem to be making an appearance) and, aside from the occasional glimpse of janitorial staff, the school is eerily quiet.
Between planning this month’s PD sessions and organizing / assessment for the university course that I am instructing, I have managed to grab a few minutes to consume some of the unread posts in my never-dry feedreader.
One that grabbed my attention lately is the new student 2.0 blog. In particular Anthony Chivetta’s post on Thinking Creatively caught my attention. Anthony writes…
Twenty-first century education won’t be defined by any new technology. It won’t be defined by 1:1 laptop programs or tech-intensive projects. Twenty-first century education will, however, be defined by a fundamental shift in what we are teaching—a shift towards learner-centered education and creating creative thinkers. Today’s world is no longer content with students who can simply apply the knowledge they learned in school: our generation will be asked to think and operate in ways that traditional education has not, and can not, prepare us for.
The shifting nature of information in the new global community necessitates a comparable shift in our schools; a shift from teaching to learning, from students as content consumers to students as content producers.
Being literate in the 21st century will require much more than being able to read printed words on a page. As other forms of digital media dwarf text-based, print communication, success in the digital age will require information intelligence – the ability to locate, assess, harvest, connect, construct and communicate new knowledge. The ability to fluently read text remains vitally important – it’s just not enough.
Schools need to focus on two objectives; providing students with traditional, text-based reading, writing and numeracy skills (a political reality if nothing else!) while providing opportunities for students to explore, innovate and collaborate with learning partners from across the classroom to across the world using powerful, web-based 21st century information and communication tools.
Although digitizing previous teaching practices has certain efficiencies and benefits, the goal should be to move past the basic shift offered by technology where old practices are done in new ways. Instead, we want to continue the shift to focus on new practices, where learners (both teachers and students) work together to utilize new tools to focus the learning through a wide-variety of collaborative, learner-centered, project-based learning opportunities.
The need to know the capital of Florida died when my phone learned the answer.
Clearly, the focus needs to be on literacy – both traditional text and digital media – and not on content regurgitation. All members of a school community need to become 21st Century learners, modeling active, collaborative and reflective learning practices. A heavy emphasis needs to be placed on learners as content producers, where sharing their work with authentic audiences will motivate students. Real connections with parents, students and experts from around the world will provide assessment that can’t be measured by a letter grade.
Literacy should be embedded across the curriculum. It irks me when a Math teacher begs off writing in their class…”I teach Mathematics, not literacy”…All teachers need to be given direction, and the tools, to be literacy teachers. Cross-curricular, student-centered and purposeful content production will provide the basis for students to begin to acquire the skills to work, play and learn as 21st Century global citizens.
Before taking on my current position, I team taught with another teacher…two if us with 60 kids, one big classroom, all day. Not being tied to a schedule gave us the flexibility to work in a variety of ways. Today, if I was given the opportunity, I would do things even more differently. The only things being “taught” would be literacies, both language arts and mathematics. Other subjects would be “learned” by students, as they worked on producing content for, and making connections to, the authentic world outside the classroom.
tags: technology, education, whipple
Photo Credit: classroom concentration, Originally uploaded to flickr by phitar, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic
1 Comment so far
Great post, Jeff! You are right on about learning of literacies is not just for language arts! I have been so encouraged to see more and more teachers recognize the GREAT value in global collaborative learning projects! Let’s keep talking and get it going!