Wednesday, December 17, 2008
21st Century Learners
What skills and perspectives do students need in their education to best prepare them to cope and thrive in the 21st century? How should a school like The Westminster Schools of Atlanta position itself to meet the highest standards of excellence in education for the 21st Century?
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4 comments:
Maybe we develop content collectively during the class periods - the teacher poses the questions and acts as guide/moderator, and we require students to have either an internet enabled PDA or a laptop to participate in class "discussions." Goal would be to encourage active participation and to document the collective thoughts of the class... kind of like a socratic weblog that serves as class notes. One key is that we would need to teach the necessity for verifying web-based research for authenticity (rather than accepting emphatic statements on Cool Dude's website) and for teaching the responsibility to student contributors associated with stating as fact material that they heard from "somewhere", but can't verify (e.g. McCain is going to .... Obama is...).
No educator should rest on his or her laurels -- we should always be striving to find new methods which work better. I hope it's not a contradiction if I also note here the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
The idea that the 21st Century somehow brings distinctly new challenges is a mystery to me. Every day brings new challenges. Did something special happen at midnight on December 31st, 1999?
Is this question really getting at the old binary of "traditional" vs. "progressive"? Or even, "blackboards and lectures" vs. "technology and collaboration"? If so, I'm sure we can talk about that . . .
I'm late to this party--I plead grad school, job, and life! 21st cent. learners has to do with being critical thinkers, imo. Questioning authority, looking at multiple viewpoints, looking at motivations behind statements, questioning everything. Example, while looking at reviews of a reading program I was examining, I came across a site that was fairly disparaging of the program, and upon research into who sponsored the site, it was sponsored by a conservative political group. I had to wonder why this group would seemingly work to undermine a reading program that was one of the few that had objective evidence that it worked, and was endorced by the What Works Clearinghouse of the DOE, but interestingly enough, did not involve large profit-making publishing companies. We need to teach our students to look critically at everything they read and hear, even us. Schools have historically done an excellent job in maintaining the status quo regarding social class, racism, poverty, what consitutes being educated, etc., and we would have to look at what we do and do not do to maintain the status quo as well. Are we willing to ask our students, and ourselves, to do that?
I'm also joining this late, but I'd like to echo what Marjorie said about teaching students to verify the authenticity of a website and the credentials of its author. Just look at this website based on a fictitious creature to demonstrate how anyone can put anything on the Internet and people will believe it: www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.
I show my high school students how to use technocrati.com to help them make informed decisions.
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