Thursday
April 02, 2009
Please enjoy posts from Golden Apple’s own Penny Lundquist for the next few weeks. Penny is a 1986 Golden Apple Fellow. She has been on the staff of Golden Apple for 17 years, and currently serves as Golden Apple’s Director of Professional Development. Prior to working at Golden Apple, she was an English teacher with 23 years of classroom experience in grades five through twelve. Her interests include literacy and teacher professionalism.
What follows is a highly personal list of what I perceive to be 5 key education trends . . . expressed as injunctions. I would love to have readers comment on my choices and list picks of their own. These are in no particular order, just things I’m picking up surfing the internet, reading Educational Leadership, Edutopia and other education publications, and following Obama’s/Duncan’s education priorities.
A few days ago, I published the first two trends: It’s the Teachers, Stupid! and It’s the Students, Stupid! Here’s #3:
3. Children need 21st Century Skills.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a collaboration including business and technology leaders such Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and Verizon, and educational organizations such as Discovery Education, Scholastic, and the NEA, advocates for the full implementation of a new framework for conceptualizing education in the 21st Century, arguing that,
There is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces...U.S. schools must align classroom environments with real world environments by infusing 21st century skills.
The framework, which has already been adopted by state partners in ten states, emphasizes a wide variety of themes, including critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, technology skills, self-directed learning, leadership, and cross-cultural understanding.
In an examination of West Virginia’s implementation of the 21st Century Skills Framework, EdWeek noted that successful integration of the framework would require a “fundamental change in teachers’ roles.”.
In his recent education speech (3/10/09), outlining his administration’s focus for the future, President Obama expanded on this idea:
In a 21st-century world where jobs can be shipped wherever there’s an Internet connection, where a child born in Dallas is now competing with a child in New Delhi, where your best job qualification is not what you do, but what you know—education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it’s a prerequisite for success. I’m calling on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.
It will take all of us working together, not just state education chiefs and state governors, to gear up our education system so that students learn what they need to know for successful participation in the new age. We have to educate students for the future, not the past.
For more, check out: http://www.21stcenturyskills.org
In the next week, I’ll discuss two more trends in education.
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I agree with your first 3 items. I think it is imperative that our students be taught the skills they need to survive in the 21st century. We no longer need to teach the assembly line skills that were needed in the past.
I hope one of your final two items will deal with how we are going determine when students have obtained the vital problem solving and critical thinking skills you mention above. Its pretty clear that the current high stakes standardized tests can do nothing to measure those crucial skills.
