Category Archives: 21st Century Skills

ISTE 2010 – Day 2 Takeaways

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Posted by Aaron Eden on July 8, 2010 – 12:29 pm
Filed under 21st Century Skills, The Big Questions

Also known as Alan November day. Here are nuggets from two great sessions with Alan:

Alan November
Empathy: The 21st-Century Skill
www.NovemberLearning.com blog /  podcasts

Globalize the curriculum

Develop contacts with teachers and children around the world

Overseas students work harder than their teachers. How do we do that
here?

CEO of largest bank in world: most important skill for global business
= empathy

Michael Wesch (videos on YouTube
Anthropologist) – independently also says empathy

West point mission study commissioned by Petreus: old mission = win
the war
New mission = win the peace

Difference is not adding technology to old curriculum.
Do we need to change our mission?
Test scores as mission is way to fail.
Impose NCLB on other countries if we want to win

How you set up your search determines what viewpoint you get – what do
they think in turkey? Use root zone database for country codes

Assignment: what are British kids essays like on the American
revolution?
Site:sch.uk “American revolution”
Compare and contrast brit and American point of view. Find email
address of teacher who is responsible for content.
Will students be more prepared for the skype debate with the Brit students
or for test on subject: was revolution inevitable?

All content involving other countries or cultures should involve
finding their viewpoint

Starting in kindergarten!

Public schools were put in place for democracy

Tools needed to become president are blocked in most schools (social
media)

Digital Learning Farm: Students as Contributors

We have undervalued the contribution that can be made by kids in our
schools

Strategy for improving learning is to focus on the conversations
between kids

Purpose, not just relevance for school “work”

Students could design tutorials for the entire curriculum

Not grading produces better work if there is purpose in the assignment

First day of school
Give kids top ten most difficult concepts and ask them to help teach it

See hitech high
Best test scores in CA

Shift control of learning to students
And responsibility

Rich media stories of what they learned that week
Do not grade these ! Reduces quality (dan pink )

Rotating scribes (or scribe teams) as benefit to learning, sharing,
social integration , and formative feedback to teacher
-by end of year kids have written the textbook, adding much of their
own content

Team of kids:  find all the applications of a cell phone for learning

Have kids contribute to building custom search engines (and teachers)

“Can I answer my own question too?”

Official researcher (rotating) finding best resources during each
lecture to place into custom search engine

Global communicator too – find global contacts related for each lesson
for authentic interaction and other viewpoints

Use kiva.com – kids raise money and decide who to give it to

Have kids create or edit wikipedia entries

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ISTE 2010 – Leadership Bootcamp

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Posted by Aaron Eden on June 29, 2010 – 11:28 pm
Filed under 21st Century Skills, The Big Questions

This was the first year of the leadership bootcamp at ISTE, with help from TIE Colorado. Not the best use of everyone’s time, but not a bad first year. Chris Lehmann’s (blog) lunch address was worth the day in itself. Most of the sessions in the three tracks were focused on professional learning networks, or some variation thereof, and there was significant overlap between all of the sessions. And as usual, there was plenty of do as I say and not as I do.

Here are the nuggets from Chris’s lunch address, though, which I thought were very valuable and worth repeating:

Angelo Patri
Innovative educator early 1900s. Look into what he was up to

Education not training

Citizens not workers

Responsibility instead of accountability

Innovation not change

Technology like oxygen
Ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible

Neil Postman – check him out

Read Dewey again. Just do it

What’s good not what’s new

Empower teachers and students

Students should sit on every panel making divisions about the school

Not how will we fix schools but what do we want them to be

Focus on the middle third

Not me making you better but you and me making us better

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Teaching and Assessing Skills

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Posted by Aaron Eden on November 13, 2009 – 6:14 pm
Filed under 21st Century Skills

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcmetroblogger/3297731157/

So we’ve looked at what 21st Century Skills are, why they are important, and how skills relate to content. The next question is, How do you teach these skills (and by implication, assess them)?

As I said in my last post, the way to teach these skills is to get explicit:

  1. name the skill (thanks Angela Maiers)
  2. facilitate the learning of the skill (through guided doing)
  3. assess the skill
    Iteratively to facilitate the learning:
    -Identify and capitalize on strengths
    -Identify and correct or compensate for weaknesses
    (Thanks Robert Sternberg)

So let’s get concrete with an example:

Just the other day I was pulled into a mask making project by my twin boys, who are in kindergarten. At first I was a little distracted by something I was trying to work on, but seeing that was futile,  I quickly gave up on that and got involved. Now paying attention, I quickly realized that I was watching my boys learn to problem solve. Continue reading 'Teaching and Assessing Skills'»

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Knowledge vs. Skills – The 21st Century Debate

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Posted by Aaron Eden on November 2, 2009 – 3:14 pm
Filed under 21st Century Skills
The American Association of Colleges and Universities stressed in its 2002 report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, that…
“the current emphasis on “factual recall” is a major barrier to success in college. Today’s college students, the report concludes, need to be “integrative thinkers who can see connections in seemingly disparate information and draw on a wide range of knowledge to make decisions.” *
This conclusion would seem to weigh in on the long-running debate in education over whether it is more important to teach content or skills to our students. However, what is meant here is not that skills should be taught in place of content, but that the emphasis on content over skills is problematic, because it is the skillful use of information/content that is the necessary end point. In effect, we are stopping short of where we need to be going, stopping at content – the foundaion of skill – and not moving effectively to the  higher level of using the content to do things, solve problems, etc.
By content we of course mean information, and by skills…well, this set is less clearly defined, and that is part of the problem in getting clarity over this issue. Let’s assume for the purpose of this argument that we are talking about a broad set of “soft skills’ that include collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, etc. The newly termed “21st Century Skills” do a good job of approximating the set of soft skills that most people speak of, however one has to be careful here because at least in the ISTE – NETS version, technology is so interwoven (for good reason) that many people are scared away.
The irony of the either-or argument, is that you cannot learn one without the other. The erroneous assumption by those pushing back against the “skills” idea is the assumption that by teaching skills in addition to content, you must displace large amounts of content, thus graduating students who know “less”. While this would seem to make sense on the surface, if done right, the opposite is actually true: teaching 21st Century Skills fully integrated into the content curriculum helps improve content learning, retention, and recall. (Why is this, and what is the proof? We’ll look at these questions next time)
So how do we teach 21st Century Skills integrated into the content curriculum in such a way that not only are the skills learned, but the content is learned better (“better” being defined as deeper retention and ability to recall / use in appropriate ways)?
Here is the key: to be taught successfully, 21st Century Skills must be given the importance of any other subject, and be taught and assessed just as explicitly as any other subject, with these differences:
1)  Unlike with content, skills must be learned and demonstrated by doing (although, again, content is learned better this way to)
2) 21st Century Skills cannot be taught as a seperate class. They must be fully integrated with all other curricula.
Let’s use the analogy of teaching someone how to hammer a nail. In this case the hammer and the nail are content. Learning what a hammer and a nail are does not equate to learning how to hammer a nail into a piece of wood. In this case, as in all cases, the skill is the ability to manipulate the content to do something, to build on the knowledge of what a hammer and a nail are, and use them to solve a problem, e.g. how to join two pieces of wood.
As we can see form this example, you must have a foundational content knowledge before you can learn a skill – you cannot learn how to hammer without knowing what a hammer and a nail are. And conversely, knowledge of  what a hammer and a nail are is greatly inmproved upon by actually using them.
So, we can teach content better – so that it is retained with a greater chance of being used to synthesize information to solve problems – by having students use it to solve problems when they learn it. Thus we have taught problem solving and at the same time we have taught the content.
Now, for the many teachers who say, “but we are already doing this”, I reply: “If you are not explicitly teaching and assessing these skills, you are not teaching the skill as well as you could be.” To do so, we must – again – get as explicit as we get with our content. We must explicitly:
1) name the skill
2) facilitate the learning of the skill
3) assess the skill (iteratively to facilitate the learning)

knowledge-skill

(This is part two of a thread, started by 21st Century Skills – Are they Neither? Though not necessary, you may want to ready that post first.)

A 2002 report by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, title Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, finds that…

emphasis on “factual recall” is a barrier to success in college and that today’s college students, need to be “integrative thinkers who can see connections in seemingly disparate information and draw on a wide range of knowledge to make decisions.”

(I originally discovered this report in the EducationSector report, Measuring Skills for the 21st Century“, which is a recommended read.)

This conclusion would seem to weigh in on the long-running debate in education over whether it is more important to teach content or skills to our students. However, what is meant here is not that skills should be taught in place of content, but that the emphasis on content over skills is problematic, because it is the skillful use of information/content that is the necessary end point. In effect, we are stopping short of where we need to be going, stopping at content – the foundation of skill – and not moving effectively to the  higher level of using the content to do things, solve problems, etc.

Continue reading 'Knowledge vs. Skills – The 21st Century Debate'»

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Kennedy School Takeaways – Information and Education

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Posted by Aaron Eden on September 18, 2009 – 4:51 pm
Filed under 21st Century Skills

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/150876458/

I had a fantastic conversation recently with Don Oppenheimer, Associate Dean and Chief Information Officer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Interestingly, his main background and experience is less in education and technology than in knowledge management (KM), and management consulting. Part of his current focus at the Kennedy School is to help with:
•    Internal knowledge management from a research and faculty perspective
•     Providing easy and open access to the intellectual capital created internally at Harvard
•     Educating the faculty and student body on tools and best practices for accessing information to support their studies, work, and research

I approached Don based on his job title which I found very interesting (and based on the fact that we are related, albeit in a labyrinthine way), because I intuited correctly that we shared similar interests and challenges in our work. In both cases, albeit in different levels of education, we are facing myriad challenges at all organizational and cultural levels to bring about organizational change in a way that integrates a forward-looking approach to education and information / knowledge management.

Here are some of the takeaways from our conversation: Continue reading 'Kennedy School Takeaways – Information and Education'»

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