scott klepesch's List: 21st Century Learning

• “What  Did You Create Today?”    

   

   

  In a couple of weeks, both Tess and Tucker will be starting their first day  at brand new schools. They’ll know no one, have all new teachers, new  surroundings, and, hopefully, new opportunities. I’m not sure they’re totally at  peace with these changes, but as I keep telling them, it’s the kind of stuff  that builds character. (I keep regaling them with school switching stories of my  own, the most challenging being when my mom moved us out to New Jersey from  Chicago when I was beginning 6th grade and three days before school started I  was wading barefoot in a creek, stepped on a broken bottle, and ended up with 10  stitches in the bottom of my foot and a pair of crutches for the first week of  classes. Talk about character building.) Wendy and I have been trying to prepare  them for this shift as best we can, and while I know it’s a bit scary for them,  I’m really hopeful the change will be good for them on a lot of different  levels

• What I’m most hopeful for, however, is that their stories about school will change. Last year, far too much of the reporting about their days started with “I got a ___ on my ___ test!” or “Yes, I’ve got homework” (said in the same voice as one might say “Yes, I’ve got ringworm.”) School was something that rarely sparked a conversation about learning. Usually, it was a topic to be avoided or ignored. I hope to hear more excitement this year, more passion about learning, more thinking and doing. To that end, I’ve been coming up with a mental list of the types of questions I’m hoping they might answer:

   

  What did you make today that was meaningful?

   

  What did you learn about the world?

   

  Who are you working with?

   

  What surprised you?

   

  What did your teachers make with you?

   

  What did you teach others?

   

  What unanswered questions are you struggling with?

   

  How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?

   

  What’s something your teachers learned today?

   

  What did you share with the world?

   

  What do you want to know more about?

   

  What did you love about today?

   

  What made you laugh?

•  

   Lectures at night, “homework” during the day. Call it the Fisch   Flip. 

   

   “When you do a standard lecture in class, and then the students go home to do   the problems, some of them are lost. They spend a whole lot of time being   frustrated and, even worse, doing it wrong,” Fisch told me.
• Why not, Godin has proposed, put out the cheaper paperback – or even an e-book   – first? Readers are more likely to gamble on an unknown author when they can   risk £8 rather than £25.

• In this sense, we need to expect that students will write beyond themselves. By this, I do not mean that students will necessarily try to write more lengthy, complex pieces than what they are ready for, although that can sometimes present them with welcome challenges. Instead, what I suggest here is that students write beyond themselves first by focusing on external audiences and purposes and, second, by learning how to respond to others, especially through digital means.
• First, I believe that students should write for external audiences

  • Critical piece to foster amongst students
• Cultivating a community of digital writers is a task that teachers need to take seriously, which leads to the second point. A digital writer needs to be both a writer and a responder. When trying to learn about their audience, students should take the opportunity to get to know them by reading what they have written and then engaging in response.
• In what ways can we think about our own writing practices — from emailing and texting, to writing letters and lesson plans — and how we use digital tools in a variety of ways to draft, revise, and publish our work?

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• A shift of this magnitude will force teachers to examine their role in student learning. Without a doubt, how educators do their daily tasks will change. We must identify the broader roles that will endure as the world continues to change dramatically. The essence of what educators must do in the future is the very same as it’s always been: to help students learn the relevant skills, knowledge, attitudes, attributes, and behaviors that they’ll need to be good and productive citizens, parents, and workers. As we outline the goals of education in the 21st century, let’s also consider some of the new functions and responsibilities of teachers.
  
• By not addressing the individual abilities and interests of each student, we’ve created an educational system that works against the ultimate goal of fostering a love for learning in each student.
• Every student’s brain . . . is wired differently. That’s the Brain Rule. You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education chooses the latter, to our detriment. It needs to be torn down and newly envisioned, in a Manhattan Project-size commitment to individualizing instruction. We might, among other things, dismantle altogether grade structures based on age.
• Teachers and students will no longer have to be in the same place for learning to occur.
• The wonderful thing about this kind of learning is that, because interest drives the learning, it will be more complete and long lasting than if the student had been forced to consider 6th-grade science concepts before 7th- and 8th-grade science, each separated by a calendar year. This kind of learning spawns engagement because it allows students to follow spontaneous ideas and interests. David Thornburg captured the power of this kind of learning:
• Intelligent tracking software will identify instructional holes and remind students of curricular goals that have not yet been met and suggest learning experiences that will cover the required course content.
• Audiovisual communication through a variety of media has become the norm. Equipping students with the skills to process multimedia messages will very soon become imperative.
• Students will need to learn how various media can be manipulated to better communicate what they want to say.
• Educators are beginning to understand that they must transition from teaching students to learning with students and even to learning from students. Transforming our professional practices to include continual learning is a powerful teaching strategy that enables educators to maintain relevance by becoming excellent role models, learning guides, process instructors, and futurists.
• Teachers need to take academic material and craft problems that will lead students into the required content while developing high-level thinking skills to solve the problem. Such problem-based tasks must also be appropriate for the intellectual and social development of students.
• Instead, students must learn to apply processes for writing, researching, and problem solving in order to accomplish tasks
• We should consider portfolios of student work, live performances, and other demonstrations of creativity and competency when we’re choosing assessment tools. Educators will provide feedback so students can improve their performance. Students need timely, targeted, nonjudgmental feedback and opportunities to make mistakes as they learn and not be penalized for them.

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• Ask yourself this very important question – would your students be there in your classrooms if they didn’t have to be? Are they there because they want to be there? Or are they there because they have no other choice? And if they’re there only because they have to, what can we begin to do differently to help more students want to be in our classes?”

  • Tough but needed question to ask. What is the motivation for being in a particular class?

• Most teachers know very little if anything about the digital world of their students – from online gaming to their means of exchanging, sharing, meeting, evaluating, coordinating, programming, searching, customizing, and socializing.”

   

  • How wide is the divide? Additionally, are we making the wrong assumption in that all of our students are digital natives and using tech in the way posed by this question?
• “If we truly want to make a difference in the lives of our children, schools must become a place where students are actively engaged in constructing their own knowledge and know how…”
• If we want to create self-directed learners, we must become one.  We must model self-directed, independent learning, and we need to discover how our students learn in the 21st Century.

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• insight and concrete examples that can help educators understand how computers are reshaping our economy, the jobs that will be available to our students & more importantly, how we can begin to restructure our classroom instruction to help develop the expert and complex thinking skills that are required to compete and hold a job in our changing economy.
• Computers don't cause unemployment, they can replace only specific types of jobs / tasks:
   1. Routine Cognitive - cognitive tasks that can be accomplished by following specific rules
   2. Routine Manual - manual tasks that follow precise, physical movement that can be programmed
• Step two, help our students developed the skills and abilities necessary to find, understand, analyze and evaluate information.
•  Expect our students to create, analyze, share, collaborate and produce something new based on the information that is collected.

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• Through communities and networks, educators have found each other and now they are using social media as the “new space” for their electronic teacher’s lounge.
• Do we ever revisit the ideas shared in a hashtag driven chat and “do” something with them? Shouldn’t we be working together to make our thinking explicit? Working together to challenge assumptions and build shared knowledge? What if we took the collective knowledge gained by trying out these ideas in varying professional contexts and then brought what we learned back to the school community?
• One of the reasons Powerful Learning Practice does action research together as a community is because the act of co-creating brings people together around a goal and moves them to action.
• Working through the process moves people past self efficacy to a shared identity and then to the building of collective wisdom from an appreciative perspective.
• educators who use action research toward a common focus find themselves co-creating and building a culture of collegiality.
• It is, however, a great tool for connecting folks and providing powerful spaces for meaningful global collaboration.

  • Power of technology and how it can be leveraged to build a culture of learning
• Technology can be a canvas

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• • Emphasis on thinking and making