This blog is written by Emma Bryant, a New Tech High School teacher who is describing her first-hand experience with 21st century-skills education. Emma Bryant is a pseudonym.
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At my school, we expect our students to become proficient in skills that, presumably, will aid them in the 21st century. We assess our students’ mastery of several skills-based learning outcomes: critical thinking and innovation, communication, work ethic, collaboration, information technology, and technological literacy. We also assess students’ content knowledge (which usually accounts for 15-20% of a student’s overall grade).
But, looking over my students’ grades, I notice odd disparities between students’ content performance and their performance on the six skills. For example: several students had overall grades (the average of all seven learning outcomes) in the 80s, but their content grades were down in the 60s. And, while the class averaged 82% in “critical thinking and innovation,” the average content grade fell a good seven points lower.
Having first hand experience of the assessment process, I would argue that the grading schema at my 21st Century School masks a failure to deliver content knowledge effectively. And that the schema overlooks the fact that acquiring deep content knowledge means thinking critically about content. Knowing the content well, as something other than a laundry list to be remembered, involves interpreting it and engaging it at a deep, critical, and meaningful level.
Proponents of my school’s approach to learning would argue that students are thinking critically and communicating even if it is about things besides content. They will say that students are thinking critically about the latest recording software, or that they are raising their communication grades through learning to make better eye contact with an audience.
As a teacher I wonder constantly about the value of substituting these skills for content. Would I rather see my students have a deep understanding and appreciation for a particular scientific principle, or a working knowledge of this year’s edition of a specific brand of photo editing software? One is lasting, while the other can be rendered irrelevant by a single upgrade. To me the choice is simple.
Emma Bryant
Excellent analysis here.
I’ve long argued that all learning (that’s not muscle memory) is content knowledge.
If we want to know if SB5 in Ohio is a good bill or a bad bill, there is just a huge amount of content knowledge we must have. “Critical thinking” is not just a habit of criticizing (which is where the phrase came from – literary criticism). It’s the ingrained habit of running every algorythm you know against the set of facts related to the bill.
For example, the steps for analyzing a pension plan. Have teachers and firefighters demanded more than can be provided, as state officials claim? To know that, we have to know something about rates of return on investments. Which means we have to know about compounded interest, including content knowledge about logarithms.
Another example I frequently use is the US Defense budget. If you set out to learn about it, and “Google” the facts you need (as is so often suggested by teachers and pundits), you can go a very long way in developing a case as to how much the budget should be cut, based on spending rates around the world, spending compared to domestic spending, etc. You’ll come up with a great piece of critical thinking no one can question.
Unless, of course you want a military who can respond to Tsunamis in Japan and Hurricanes in New Orleans, and provide dental clinics in South America and launch a war in Afghanistan (as nearly everyone agreed we should) and be prepared to defend in the pacific, run the dams which protect against flooding in the Midwest, have tea with every pasha in the middle east, be sensitive to women’s and minority issues, speak 180 languages, maintain absolute financial integrity, and all the rest.
With the latter approach, you first need mental frameworks about land warfare, institutional development, human nature, technology development processes, shipping, air cargo, fuel logistics, and much more. You get these by knowing about history and engineering, geography, accounting, and much, much more.
Stuff all built on the content knowledge you pick up in K-12.
Now. along the way comes discipline, akin to muscle memory. The more problems you solve, the more simple lab experiments you run, the more you test your thought processes against definable real-world outcome, the more you refine this discipline. That’s why math is so powerful for K-12 and even university education. (It’s why West Point treats its future platoon leaders as engineering students).
Of course, content knowledge can outlast discipline. I may still remember what compound interest is into my dotage, but lose the discipline of asking the questions, applying the algorithms, and living by the answers.
This post is about something that all New Tech Network teachers wrestle with. But, one thing that must happen is that reteaching and scaffolding of concepts must accompany all units of material. It sounds like Emma is doing the right thing in that she is monitoring the overall grade and the content grades. It’s too easy to let the overall grade mask problem areas.
That is another reason why teaching in a New Tech school is so difficult. Not only are you creating and monitoring original projects but you must be constantly assessing student knowledge so that the teacher can create scaffolding workshops.
Unlike conventional classes where you know you are going to be on pages 234 to 241 this week and there will be a quiz at the end of the week before heading to the next unit that starts on page 244; in PBL you have to know that at certain points in the project students must master ideas that would have been covered in pages 234 5o 241. The book, however, is not used as a primary source. It is a place students can access for additional information. The teacher can certainly assign the problems on page 242 as classwork and there could still be a quiz over that material at the end of the week. But now this is material that the students have discovered that they need to know to be successful in the project.
I keep coming back to the fact that Emma is not getting any help here at this school or she would be sitting with her content area teachers discussing the fact that content grades are too low and she should be getting recommendations from the other content teachers, any master teachers, any district instructional coaches, and her New Tech Network Coach.
Come on school help Emma out!