Archive for the ‘21st Century Skills’ Category

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Who Defines Education and Why It Matters

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Have you noticed that people increasingly talk about the purpose of education as a driver of the economy and less a delivery system for knowledge and learning?  Apparently our nation’s governors are at least in part to blame for this shift. According to a recent study published by the International Journal on Education Policy and Leadership, governors seldom discuss the topic of education independent of economic growth.

Education Week’s Sean Cavanagh highlights Dick M. Carpenter and Haning Hughes’ analysis of this trend and its effects on policy:

Because governors create policies based on how they define the purpose of education, Carpenter and Hughes contend. The emphasis that governors place on ‘economic efficiency’ is likely to feed states’ overall interest in standards, assessment, and accountability, the authors say.

Even as governors voice concern over college- and career-readiness and high dropout rates in high school and higher education, they continue to champion reforms that have had only minimal impact. Perhaps if governors shifted their educational rhetoric to emphasize the importance of building a knowledgeable and engaged citizenry, their policies would align to encourage education rooted in quality content, with positive impact in the classroom.

Gubernatorial rhetoric rings strikingly similar to that of the skills-centric movement; both find basis in economic rationales for reform. And both have resulted in little to no improvement in the state of our education system, as testified by our students’ test scores. This is because education in skills, without basis in knowledge, leads to minimal learning.

Far too often, those outside of education take it upon themselves to define it. But it is up to the people within education—educators and advocates alike—who understand and live its inner-workings, to call for a better definition.

Hillary Marder

 

Posted in 21st Century Skills, Curriculum | 2 Comments »

Caution for Digital Literacy Enthusiasts

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

In a letter to Time, Annie Murphy Paul says “we’re overestimating how much computers will teach our kids” and undervaluing the importance of content knowledge:

“There is no doubt that the students of today, and the workers of tomorrow, will need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the ’21st century skills’ so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you have to know what came before. To collaborate, you have to contribute knowledge to a joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information against knowledge you’ve already mastered. Nor is there any reason that these skills must be learned or practiced in the context of technology. Critical thinking is crucial, but English students engage in it whenever they parse a line of poetry or analyze the motives of an unreliable narrator. Collaboration is key, but it can be effectively fostered in glee club or on the athletic field. Whatever is specific to the technological tools we use right now—and these tools are bound to change in any case—is designed to be easy to learn and simple to use.”

Read on, here.

 

Posted in 21st Century Skills, Technology | No Comments »

Educating Our Students for the Future

Friday, September 16th, 2011

Are education reformers—and even educators themselves—capable of forecasting the education “essentials” of tomorrow?  In an article for Education Week, Christopher Doyle challenges the notion of a set of 21st century skills. Historically, he writes, we have been unsuccessful at predicting skills essential to the future. He points to forward-thinking talents like Einstein, Freud, Gandhi, and Picasso, “those truly oriented to the future,” who felt “alienated in their own time.” Such artists and thinkers deviated from the educational norms of their day to blaze their own paths to success.

In contrast to those who would teach the skills of the future, he offers his agenda as a teacher:

“It is to teach my subject matter, history, to the best of my ability. This includes trying to understand and reach a generation of high school students whose intellectual world is increasingly fragmented into sound bites, PowerPoint bullets, text messages, Facebook posts, and “tweets,” and who appear rapidly to be losing the capacity for lengthy reading, synthesis of thought, and critical analysis. My agenda also encompasses linking the past to current events such as climate change, economic and debt crises, and wars on terrorism. I aspire additionally to teach empathy and ethics, qualities that I believe the discipline of history is uniquely capable of developing. And I seek to improve my students’ skill at writing while sharpening their capacity for critical thought.

“I do not know if any of this qualifies as ‘21st century.’ It often seems difficult enough; yet it appears far more realistic and hopeful to stick to my subject than to chart a suspect course toward a badly drawn image of the future.”

Still, reformers, such as the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, continue to re-package skills that have been taught for centuries in shiny new jargon.  Leaving us to wonder if the artists and philosophers of tomorrow are being any better served in the classrooms of the 21st century than they were in those of the 19th.

Hillary Marder

Posted in 21st Century Skills | 2 Comments »

Cut and Pasted!

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

Our disagreement with the skills-centric movement in education, particularly our criticism of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), is no secret. We’ve criticized P21 again and again for their evidence-free rhetoric, shallow curricular models, and “cut-and-paste” approach to subject matter knowledge (Why learn things when you can just find them on the Internet?). So we’re chagrined to find ourselves the victim of a P21 “cut-and-paste.”

P21 has included an unrepresentative excerpt of one of our curriculum Maps in its new Common Core Toolkit (see page 18). They’ve done this in a manner which reveals, once again, their deep misunderstanding of the key role that subject matter knowledge plays in learning.

P21 cut and pasted the overview of our Grade 8, Unit 4 unit on “Authors and Artists” into their document:

In this unit, students step back and consider the motivations of authors and artists alike: What inspires artists? Are their inspirations similar or different? How is the process of creating a painting or sculpture similar to and different from the process of writing a story or poem? Students read books written about artists and study artwork found in museums across America. Students work with classmates to discern the unspoken meaning in literature and art. Students also discuss illustrations and other forms of commercial art, looking for differences and similarities in fine and commercial art, in terms of both its motivation and its presentation. They write an informative/explanatory essay about an artist of interest. The unit ends with an informative/explanatory essay in response to the essential question: How are artists and authors similar?

P21 put forward this, along with two (of our eight) CCSS “focus” standards from our unit, as one of eight “Sample ELA Lesson Starters” in its toolkit. It offered no other specifics from our unit, which lists 10 specific student learning objective, recommends more then two dozen readings on figures from Mark Twain to Mary Cassatt, Maya Angelou to Marc Chagall, along with eight paintings, and seventeen student activities illustrating how to meet the new standards while deepening student knowledge of important authors and artists.  Here’s just one example of the kind of activity we recommend:

Examine and discuss the variety of perspectives used by the artists in the artworks (e.g., worm’s-eye view, sitting at the table, far away, or up close). Identify the perspective in each work. How does the perspective affect the viewer’s relationship to the work? For instance, in the works by Caravaggio and Cézanne, does it seem as if there is a spot left for the viewer at the table? How does this differ from the perspective in [Hieronymous] Bosch’s work? What about [Chuck] Close’s? How do these artists use perspective to draw viewers in? Write responses to these questions in your journal and share with a partner prior to class discussion. Discuss how this compares to authors’ use of point of view in the characters they create.

Our Maps are informed by the cognitive science that has demonstrated that in order to think critically about a topic, students must study content directly related to it. As Andy Rotherham and Dan Willingham write, “All content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.”

As much as we want to share our work, we do not appreciate P21 cannibalizing our curriculum Maps and do not believe that their appropriation can be helpful to anyone. The teachers who wrote our Maps worked tirelessly to connect the skills identified in the standards with rich texts and works of art, with essential knowledge. And now their work is being further enhanced by the teachers nationwide who are using our Maps to create their own informed and imaginative lessons. We’d prefer P21 not cheapen their work and ours with a sloppy “cut and paste.”

Lynne Munson

 

Posted in 21st Century Skills, Curriculum | 1 Comment »

Another Misstep from AP

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

A transcript loaded with course titles boasting “AP” or its equivalent is your student’s ticket into a name-brand college or university. Or is it? According to College Board, last year more than 1.8 million students participated in the program, often at the urging at parents and administrators.

Unfortunately for these students, College Board’s Advanced Placement Program (AP) seems determined to water down its curriculum. To this end, College Board Vice President Trevor Packer, who oversees the AP program, recently announced its membership in the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21):

“The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has been a guiding light for the AP Program as we have thought about the knowledge and skills the AP program should consciously strive to promote. … We are thrilled to formally join this partnership as we roll out a major redesign of the AP science and history programs.”

For those of you new to the debate, P21 falls heavy on skills-promotion and light on content knowledge. With passing reference to the liberal arts, the core of P21’s message is the importance of a set of skills necessary for a 21st century world: critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration, and creativity and innovation. Important skills, yes. But students develop these skills while they acquire knowledge. Cognitive science has proven that skills such as those P21 promotes cannot effectively be learned in isolation.

Even AP’s toughest critics have long lauded the program for its commitment to rich content.  But AP recently revamped its curriculum considerably at the behest of those like P21—who would strip science and history of content and progression in favor of poorly organized and often-trite themes.

An organization calling P21 its “guiding light” begs our doubt.

Lynne Munson and Stephanie Porowski

Posted in 21st Century Skills, Curriculum | 1 Comment »

What Will They Think Critically About?

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

Some wonderfully “Deep Questions about ‘Deeper Thought’” … and the Common Core State Standards from Peter Meyer:

“Teachers don’t teach standards; they teach ‘the stuff of knowledge,’ in Ted Sizer’s words. Standards come from that stuff, not the other way around. We get our history standards from—where else—history; more specifically, from the events and facts of history. Our students need to learn it. We get ELA standards from great literature—our children need to read it.”

Read on, here.

Posted in 21st Century Skills, Standards | No Comments »

Teaching Knowledge; Fostering Critical Thinking

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

We highlight the importance of content knowledge at every possibility—and criticize those who would emphasis teaching  skills, like critical thinking, over knowledge.  But we’re all for thinking critically. Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham is perhaps the best advocate for the content-driven approach to fostering critical thinking. In his book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, he writes:

“Our goal is not simply to have students know a lot of stuff—it’s to have them know stuff in service of being able to think effectively. … [T]hinking critically requires background knowledge. Critical thinking is not a set of procedures that can be practiced and perfected while divorced from background knowledge. Thus it makes sense to consider whether students have the necessary background knowledge to carry out a critical thinking task you might assign. For example, I once observed a teacher ask her fourth-grade class what they thought it would be like to live in a rain forest. Although the students had spent a couple of days talking about rain forests, they didn’t have the background knowledge to give anything beyond shall responses (such as “It would be rainy”). She asked them the same question at the end of the unit, and the students’ answers were much richer. One student immediately said she wouldn’t want to live there because the poor soil and constant shade would mean she would probably have to include meat in her diet—and she was a vegetarian (48).”

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Assessing, for What?

Friday, March 11th, 2011

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

 

Posted in 21st Century Skills, Teacher Perspective | 2 Comments »

Science Manuals—For English Class

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Over the course of the coming months Common Core will be publishing a series of guest blogs by Emma Bryant, a New Tech High School teacher who will be describing her first-hand experience with 21st century-skills education.  Emma Bryant is a pseudonym.

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This year, tenth graders in my “21st Century School” aren’t suffering the annoyances that accompany studying poetry, fiction, or even non-fiction texts. Instead, students are writing instructional manuals, describing scientific processes, and using a science textbook to learn literacy skills in a joint English/Science class. No, these students are no longer plagued with requirements to read boring literature ‒ there’s simply no use for it in the utilitarian 21st century.

The process begins with students being asked to design a new piece of science equipment for use in the lab of a fictional company’s research and development unit. Using pieces of information gathered primarily from internet searches, a handful of journal articles, and much team work (95% of class time), students set out to complete their task.

Once the new equipment is created, students wrote about how to use it. With just a little imagination, the students’ “user’s manual” satisfied state English Language Arts requirements. In all fairness, I did not study each and every manual. So who knows ‒ there could have been a real literary gem hidden away. But somehow I doubt it.

Teachers facilitated the development of literacy skills with passages of the science textbook, as well as portions of manuals. Students read sentences on scientific subject matter and details on user instruction. Teachers administered vocabulary tests on scientific terms and instruction manual jargon.

In the end, students created some interesting designs and, to varying degrees, applied basic elements of science to the design process. On the whole, however, science content played second fiddle to other requirements ‒ the use of specific design software, credit for communication and collaboration, and the hard-to-define, but still-assessed, “innovation.” And “English” fared even worse.

With a world of literature waiting ‒ a world of human experience for the reading ‒ it’s a travesty for dry (but useful!) manuals to take its place.

Emma Bryant

 

Posted in 21st Century Skills, Teacher Perspective | 3 Comments »

Need Content? Just Google It!

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

Common Core’s critique of the 21st century skills movement has highlighted the opinions of a host of scholars including Dan Willingham, Diane Ravitch, and E.D. Hirsch, each of whom exposed deep flaws in the program put forth by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Today, we’re bringing you the observations of another expert. And, this time, it is someone tasked with delivering 21st century skills-based education every day.

Emma Bryant is a pseudonym for a teacher at a New Tech High School. There are 62 New Tech High Schools in 14 states across the country. Substantial funding from corporations and foundations ensures that these schools are outfitted with all of the best and latest learning technology. And, even though the New Tech Network’s website says that the schools’ mission is to help students gain both ”the knowledge and skills they need,” skills take top priority–at least according to Emma.

Over the course of the next few months Common Core will be publishing a series of guest blogs by Emma, who will be describing her first-hand experience with 21st century-skills education.

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I teach in a school that typifies skills-based education. We practice project based learning, utilize the latest technology, and hold to a mission of helping our students acquire “21st century skills.” We work diligently to replace traditional classroom norms with those of corporate culture so that our students will someday thrive in an increasingly competitive global marketplace — a new world demanding innovation, collaboration, and critical thinking.

Unfortunately, bowing to the norms of 21st century business interests leaves little room anything else. Literature, poetry, music, theater, or even a solid understanding of history are either omitted or given short shrift in favor of developing skills. Utility takes precedence over “fluff” and most content, after all, can be Googled anyway.

So, how does my school help build the much-hyped 21st century skills? Roughly once a month we present students with a new project which must result in a “product.” According to our model the more “real world” the product, the better. Real world, meaning the product mirrors what could reasonably be demanded in a corporate setting — from a redesigned company logo and slogan to a promotional video or a press release. Students work in small teams to complete projects, with each team member receiving the same grade at the end. After all, it’s not about what individual students learn but the final product. Students are assessed on a handful of learning outcomes — collaboration, communication, innovation, work ethic, technological literacy, information literacy and content. Content usually makes up between 15 and 30 percent of a student’s grade.

So, what is the role of content in a 21st century classroom? Content is a shopping list of rubric indicators to be applied to the product. For example, students might work a quote from a short story into a reworded company slogan. Or perhaps they might work with Photoshop to create a company logo depicting an event from European history. They might write a press release in the style of a founding American document or create a user’s manual for a product using a particular rhetorical device mentioned in our state’s English Language Arts standards.

Apart from being grafted onto “real world” products, content is rarely discussed in the classroom. Instead, students deal with content in teams or individually, with little to no scaffolding from the teacher. Dialogue, questions, critical thinking, and debate surrounding content are low on the list of things you will see in a 21st century classroom. And so students end up with convoluted ideas about history, a cursory understanding of and appreciation for literature, and a shaky foundation in math and science.

Emma Bryant

Posted in 21st Century Skills, Teacher Perspective | 23 Comments »

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