21st Century Learning and Teaching

Education may be the passport to the future, but for all the good teaching out there, it would seem that schools are failing to impart some of the most important life skills, according to one educational expert.

Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group, argues that today’s school children are facing a “global achievement gap”, which is the gap between what even the best schools are teaching and the skills young people need to learn.

This has been exacerbated by two colliding trends: firstly, the global shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, and secondly, the way in which today’s school children – brought up with the internet – are motivated to learn.

In his book The Global Achievement Gap, Wagner identifies seven core competencies every child needs in order to survive in the coming world of work.

1. Critical thinking and problem-solving

With logic you start out with certain ingredients just as in playing chess you start out with given pieces. But what are those pieces? In most real life situations the pieces are not given, we just assume they are there. We assume certain perceptions, certain concepts and certain boundaries. Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. Lateral thinking is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then 'process'.

A healthy human brain does not want to always be creative, it is designed to figure out how to do things or how to think about things and then 'locks' that automatic response or behaviour into a subconscious process so that your conscious brain can focus on other matters.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Thinking

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Think-Different

http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Think+outside+the+box

Our Big List of 21st Century Skills
The Global Digital Citizen Foundation has given hundreds of presentations to educators and administrators in several countries over the years. Each time we’ve spoken, we have asked them what they feel are the most important 21st century skills students need above all others.
The answers that we’ve recieved most often are narrowed down below. This list comes from our book Literacy is Not Enough (Crockett, Lee et. al.; 2011). You’ll be able to see that these points correlate rather well with both the New Zealand’s capabilities list and the IB Learner Profile. They certainly cover the Common Core’s bases, too. It’s good to know we’re all on the same page, isn’t it? That’s great news for our students!
So, according to the folks we’ve asked, the consensus is that students need to acquire transparency-level skills in the following areas:

Problem solving
Creativity
Analytic thinking
Collaboration
Communication
Ethics, action, and accountabillty

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/what-are-the-skills-needed-from-students-in-the-future/

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/the-new-possibilities-to-learn-and-teach-with-ict/

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/learning-path-for-professional-21st-century-learning-by-ict-practice/