We have the Parternship for 21st Century Skills, of course, but this seems to be only one dimension of what many talk about when they mention 21st century education.

I’ve been having a hard time wrapping my head around it, so to get some help from my colleagues and compile all of the various thoughts and ideas about the concept into one place, I’ve put together a Google document called “Compare & Contrast 20th/21st Century Education“. OK, not a spectacular title, I admit. But I thought that if we could generate a list of how modern education can, should, or does differ from the “old way” of doing things, maybe that would help me get a better handle on it. And if it helps some other people in the process, so much the better.

To take it to another level, Kim Printz (@paperwerksart on Twitter) asked me this tonight:

So I’ve added a section at the bottom of the document to share ideas about what to do with this list. Where should it go? How can we use it to impact schools and students? Come join both parts of the conversation, and add your thoughts to the list. Then take the list and share it with someone: a colleague, a parent, a principal. In the end, what matters most is not how we define 21st century education, but how we apply it to help students learn.

The Cabs of Times Square, by joiseyshowaa

I had a wide-ranging conversation over coffee the other day with David Timony (@drtimony on Twitter). One of the things that came up was the idea of students as consumers. David is doing research about what constitutes an expert teacher, focusing on teacher behaviors that influence student perceptions of expertise. It got me thinking about how we treat teachers and students in the big picture and the business of education today.

For a long time, educators have been told we need to run schools more like businesses, that the students are the consumers, and we need to let the market drive our methods. We should measure student performance and student reaction like corporations measure consumer preference and adjust our methods to produce the outcomes (increased sales) that we are looking for.

I have a problem with this approach, though. It presumes that the students are passive recipients of the education we are producing. It also leads to a market where many of the producers (schools) resort to manipulative and deceptive tactics to increase the numbers. We only need to look at recent news on Wall Street to see that reliance on one metric to judge performance can not only cause problems but it can affect the entire economy. Is this really what we want for education?

What if we turn the model upside down? What if we think of the students not as consumers but as the producers?

In the marketplace, corporations have a lot of control over their product, their methods, their advertising, but they are ultimately dependent on the consumer to judge their products and make them successful. The consumers also provide a great deal of feedback to the companies about what works, what doesn’t, and how they can improve their products to make them more successful. In addition, corporations have to work within an existing environment that dictates much of what they must do to succeed: laws, tax structures, suppliers, competition, investors, and so on.

If students become the producers, they will have to work in the environment created by the schools and teachers, including curriculum, standards, and so on. The teachers become the consumers, providing feedback and guiding the learning process (roughly parallel to R&D in the corporate world).

This model is far from perfect, of course. There is a great deal about learning and about school that doesn’t fit into the business approach. But if we’re going to be asked, or even required, to do business like a business, then let’s really examine that model and think hard about what it means for kids.

Curriculum today is very full. We do our best to stuff every little thing that may have some importance or relevance to a subject into the 180 day school year, and since it won’t all fit, we assign the rest as homework. Any teacher who has been teaching for more than a year knows that there is no practical way to complete the entire prescribed curriculum in one year, even if you take the tour bus approach and just point out the highlights to the students as you cruise by at seventy miles and hour.

I’m no longer convinced that the purpose of curriculum is to assemble in one place all the important “stuff” that a kid should know by the end of the school year. There’s too much that’s important anyway, we won’t all agree on which things are truly important, and the volume increases almost daily.

So what if curriculum instead were designed with holes, with a certain amount of white space? In visual design, the white space does a few things: it brings attention to the other elements of the design, it allows them to breathe, and it helps make them dynamic. Taking out some stuff and leaving more space in the curriculum can do similar things for the student.

Invite. Curriculum should first be built so that the student wants to engage with the content. It should be active, it should be interesting, it should be personal. Make it real and relevant. Start with where the students are. Connect to their interests and their worlds.

Inspire. Next the curriculum should motivate students to want to learn about the subject. The word inspire originally meant “to breathe into” or “to infuse life by breathing”. There is very little breathing room in today’s curriculum. Kids have no time to breathe in and reflect on their learning. They just have to cram it in and move on.

Ignite. Finally, the curriculum must light the fire. Leave students at the end of the unit or school year feeling like there is so much more to explore and so much deeper to go. If we ignite their passions and their natural curiosity, they will continue to pursue it on their own.

I remember so many times “discovering” a subject as a teacher that I thought I had no interest in learning about, but when I really engaged it (because I had to teach it), I found it fascinating and went on to study it on my own. I think a well-designed curriculum can do that for students.

Understand that I don’t believe curriculum can do this alone. None of these things can or will happen without an excellent teacher. Curriculum doesn’t live until students and teachers interact and engage it. But a strong curriculum will give the teacher the tools and resources to accomplish these things more easily.

Accomplishing this is the real challenge, of course. How do we create a curriculum that does these things? How do we anticipate where kids are when there are so many different varied experiences around the world? Perhaps this is an argument for purely locally designed curricula, but I’m not sure that’s practical. What do you think? How can we make this happen? Or is it just a fantasy that will never become reality?

It is not my purpose today to engage in this debate. But I keep coming back to a comment that was made to me recently in connection with a project I’m doing at work. My district is in the midst of a comprehensive review and analysis of our gifted program. As part of that review, we have created a new vision and mission statement for the gifted program. (For the curious among you, it is posted here)

I shared the draft of that document with my administration, then unveiled it publicly for the first time at a school board meeting. In among the many positive and encouraging responses, a few people commented that, while the statements were nice, aren’t these things we should be doing with every student?

This echoes similar sentiments I’ve heard for as long as I’ve been teaching. Of course the answer is yes; though the emphasis for the general education curriculum and program will be on different kinds of things, the “stuff” that for so long was the core of gifted education has become part of the mainstream 21st century emphasis.

It got me thinking about what gifted education should look like in today’s schools. Is it still necessary in an age when high level thinking and problem solving, collaboration, technology, differentiation, and inclusion are growing in their importance and reach in our schools? I believe it is, but my thoughts are continuing to evolve about what it should do and how.

So what should gifted education be in the 21st century? I don’t know. Yet. But I’ve invited a collection of people who have had a tremendous influence on my learning and thinking to help me answer that question. Over the next several weeks, eleven people who I consider colleagues and friends will be guests on this blog, wrestling with that very question. I am looking forward to reading what they have to say. I hope you are too.

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about pretesting that were prompted by a year-old post by Scott McCleod. Today, I came across another year-old blog post, this time by Angela Meiers. In this article, she talks about how comprehension is not something that can be contained in a discrete list of facts and skills, but rather it is an ongoing, recursive process of applying those facts and skills to build a picture of the world.

It occurs to me that what we often do in school is something like handing the students a birdhouse kit. The pieces are pre-measured and pre-cut, and everything we need is already there. We walk them all step-by-step through the assembly of the kit, focusing on their technique in hammering and gluing. It doesn’t matter that some of the kids have designed and built their own birdhouses, and others haven’t ever seen a bird before. At the end of the lesson, everyone in the class has an identical birdhouse–though perhaps we allow them to choose their own colors for the paint.

Rather than giving a pretest that runs through all of the discrete skills in a unit (“explain how to hammer a nail without bending it”, “which goes on first, the roof or the base?”), consider giving your students a one-question pretest that gets at the most important aspects of the unit you are going to teach: “Draw a design for a birdhouse and explain how you would build it.” Here are some sample One-Question Pretests that might work in various subject areas:

• Explain how America became an independent country
• Pretzels come in bags of 24 and you want to give one to each of the 473 students in our school. Figure out how many bags we need to buy and show how you computed the answer without a calculator.
• Where do new plants come from, and how do they grow?
• Tell me what grade you should get for this class, and write a paragraph that convinces me you’ve earned it.
• Read the beginning of this story and write what you think will happen next. Explain why you think so.

While you wouldn’t get discrete data on what specific skills and knowledge your students have, a careful reading and analysis of the students’ responses can give you a wealth of information that would be immensely helpful in planning your instruction. It wouldn’t take any more time than a traditional pretest. If you embed it into other activities, such as including the pretest as a learning center activity that all students will complete over the course of a week during normal rotations, it might even take less time.

How can you apply the One-Question Pretest idea to your own subject and grade level?

Abandoned School, by Terence Faircloth, 8/7/08

Much has been written about the changing needs of students in the 21st century and the transformation that must take place in our schools to make it happen. Several things are clear to me as I read them. First, it is going to take a visionary administration to remake the environment in which our schools operate in order for those changes to be possible. Second, like a mile-long freight train being switched onto another track, it will take a very long time for the needed changes to work their way down to the local level.

It took several years for No Child Left Behind to shift the focus of our schools from students to test scores, but that shift happened. In the meantime, the world shifted, too. What we really need now is No School Left Behind. Schools need to become more agile, more proactive, more willing to look ten or twenty years into the future instead of one or two.

If this website is any indication of the administration to come—one that not only listens to its consitutents, but actively invites their participation in the government—it has the necessary vision and determination. But even greater than this, it just underscores how much different a world tomorrow’s citizens will inhabit. We truly need to empower our students with the skills that &id=GDFeJnFlCfUC&dq=Optimizing+student+success+in+schools+with+the+other+three+R%27s:+Reasoning,+resilience,+and+responsibility&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=-IEU6TJngr&sig=K28Ul0XaC2mEw4wcP9iIUCSFdQc&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result" target="_blank">Robert Sternberg calls the “other three R’s”: Reasoning, Resilience, and Responsibility.

None of those are on the PSSA test. But they’re all on the real one: life.

Over and over again I read about these kinds of issues, and it keeps reminding me that as an educator, I need to rethink the way I assess my students. Even in elementary school, this kind of problem has been around for years—except in our case the “outsourcing” often means that the parents did the work for the child.

They are often well-meaning, to a point, wanting the best for their child—meaning of course the best grade. But rather than bemoaning the fact that our students (and parents) try to find the loopholes in the assignment, we need to find different ways of getting at what our kids know, understand, and are able to do.

I think it’s also important to be much more transparent about exactly what we’re looking for and why we want them to do what we’re asking. Tell them up front that the goal is not a working computer program, for example, but that it’s about the problem solving process they used to get there. So maybe we need to assess the student’s whole process—including notes and false starts and bug-filled code that won’t compile–and ask them to write about how they were able to get it working.

I also think it’s important to teach students how to use resources effectively. Instead of scolding someone for going out and getting other people involved in a project, design assignments/assessments that encourage or even require it, and assess how well the student is able to integrate the help they get into the final product.