Warrick Wynne's List: 21st Century Learning

• They are vulnerable because learning is not personally significant to them.  Kids who learn to avoid the discomfort of unfamiliar ideas, who do not welcome the instructive complications of error, who think learning is a boring necessity because it is basically about preparing for tests, who are reliant on parents and teachers to tell them what to do, or to do it for them, who expect university degrees to be passports to employability and financial security – such kids are now in real trouble
• Like their peers elsewhere, the under thirty-five year olds have arrived with the understanding that being lied to is a constant condition of their lives. Every automated message that tells them ‘your call is important to us’, every bit of spam promising massive lottery wins or inherited millions, every packaged deal of ‘unbeatable’ offers, adds to their mistrust of all but perhaps a handful of their closest peers.
• The world-weary ‘whatever’ shoulder shrug, satirised so often as typical of our kids’ response to the pushes and pulls they experience in their lives, may well be symptomatic of the latter. So those who promise to prepare young people to meet the unparalleled challenges they face in the future – and most schools make just that promise in their glossy brochures and mission statements – really have their work cut out to deliver on that promise.
• those needed to perform well on standardised pencil and paper tests of static disciplinary knowledge), becomes a ludicrously dated activity in the context of this data explosion
• In schools, we generally mandate content, ‘cover’ it, and test it as fixed and immutable knowledge. Meanwhile, the speed at which new knowledge can be acquired and the speed with which that knowledge is being displaced is increasing at an exponential rate
• 4. To choose to learn means choosing the discomfort of the unfamiliar and the not yet.
• Put simply, if our young people are to take their rightful place as active and ethical participants in this fast-changing world, they need more than low level clerical skills, or even traditional disciplinary knowledge and high levels of literacy and numeracy. They need a broad set of creative capabilities that heighten their ability to select, shuffle, re-combine, or synthesise existing facts, ideas, faculties and skills in original ways. Most important among these capacities is a disposition to welcome the instructive complications of error-making, rather than simply ‘playing safe’ through passive imitation and memorisation.
• 5. Schooling needs to provide kids with low threat, high challenge experiences
• If low threat, high challenge teaching is confronting for parents who are test-driven, it is also confronting for those teachers convinced that challenge new technologies are making young people too distractible to learn in any sustained and meaningful way. Distractibility is not, however, a mental illness – it can and should be harnessed for learning by ensuring that learning intentions remain clear.
• 6. Teachers have new responsibilities as co-learners in this scenario
• Medding-in-the-middle challenges the Sage on the Stage and the Guide on the Side in a number of ways. Specifically, it means less time standing out front giving instructions and more time spent being a usefully ignorant team member in the thick of the action, less time spent testing for correct answers and more time spent on giving kids opportunities to ask better questions, less time spent being a custodial risk minimiser and more time spent being an experimenter, risk-taker and learner, less time spent being a forensic classroom auditor and more time spent being a designer, editor and assembler, less time spent being a counsellor and ‘best buddy’ and more time spent being a collaborative critic and authentic evaluator.
• 7. The challenge for teachers is to re-professionalise, not de-professionalise

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• I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that's based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.
• Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.
• Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers

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• Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.