Seal,+Todd


 * Use the course materials to help you respond to these questions for each Module.**

Are there going to be links eventually provided for these Modules?

I present my initial thoughts about Module 1 here with full respect and honesty about the teaching career. I'm entering my 15th year as a high school English teacher and I'm always glad to have more time to think about how and what we do. Thank you for these troubling questions. I hope I find some answers and I look forward to what comes out of any discussion of these ideas!

There has, of course, been a fair buzz around this idea. I reject it, though. Yup. I, of sound body and mind, as one who always wants the latest technology and tries his best to put such things to use in my classroom as often as I can, do not think 21st century skills are much different than skills that we've valued for at least the last 100 or so years. As if life today requires a different set of skills than life has ever required. C'mon! The three Rs of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, right?! OK, it might not be that simple, but I don't think that the introduction of technology has changed what people need to be able to do; it's only changed the way they need to be able to demonstrate that and the modes in which those skills are called upon.
 * Module 1 Notes**
 * 1) What skills you think today's students will need to be able to live and work in the 21st Century?

I don't think those skills change, rather, the way those skills are applied and what they are applied to, *that's* what changes. A graduate still needs some basic understanding of nearly every subject studied in high school: a firm grasp on basic mathematics, the ability to sustain an argument (both in writing and verbally), an at least beginning understanding of one's own aesthetic sense, comfort with physical fitness and the role that plays in brain development, an understanding of our place in history, a picture of the concept of other cultures and societies, and the list goes on. I don't think there are special skills that are required when dealing with the growth of computers, which is typically what's meant when discussing the 21st century, the way computers have changed our modes of communication and creation, not just consumption, of content. I think a glance at the Common Core Standards, and even a glance at current existing state standards, gives a sense that 21st century skills are really just adaptations of the skills we've long valued in academia. While it might ask students to deal with information in a different way, the ability to decode and figure out what is essential and non-essential is a skill that's been encouraged in schools for decades. As well as I can. I constantly think about how students will be able to use what I'm promoting. I regularly try to admit to the fact that what we're doing is specific to the English domain, but that the skill I'm concentrating on has broad application in nearly any field of interest. Foundational Skills are the basic skills students need to, well, be a student. They would also be the basic skills any employee would need to be an employee. These are the skills needed in order to develop the ability to learn anything http://www.audiblox2000.com/foundational-skills.htm http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/english-language-arts-standards/reading-foundational-skills/kindergarten/ It looks like these are the basic skills required to increase ability in any field. In the area of reading, phonetic awareness is essential before even beginning a discussion about the significance of plot or character development. This seems similar to the ability to learn to walk, something essential to master before nearly any other skill.
 * 1) How you are preparing your students to gain these skills? If you are not currently teaching: How are educators preparing students to gain these skills?
 * 1) What is the difference between ’Foundation Skills" and "Functional Skills"?

Functional skills... are those the skills required for mastery in a specific content area? It took me a while to figure out what this question is asking. There are some issues with the way it's written and I think that speaks volumes about what teachers expect of students versus what teachers actually deliver. I'll throw myself into this quagmire, as well. I've certainly thrown a confusingly-phrased question or two (hundred!) at my students over the years! So does that mean that a student could be a fine individual, leading a perfectly happy and fruitful life, without the knowledge their English teacher tried to impart? Would my college trigonometry teacher be upset that I've never once referred to the sine or cosine of something? Is there any difference between a misplaced comma by one of my students and my inability to determine the factors of force that my high-school physics teacher worked so hard at passing on to me?
 * 1) How well does your curriculum and current instructional strategies help your students acquire these skill? If your are not currently teaching how well do you think our schools are using instructional strategies to help students acquire these skills?

Any time a student finds a grammatical error in something I hand out (I'm an English teacher), I feel like I've told students that errors are acceptable while at the same time I advocate for student writing to be as free of error as possible. I feel like I've given them an example of someone who does not need or exhibit the very skills my content area is all about. It's like a math teacher who demonstrates a problem and gets it mathematically wrong, a social science teacher who can't remember the dates of World War II, even though that's the current unit of study, or a PE teacher who does not practice the very habits of health they may be covering in class at the moment. And that makes me wonder if any of the skills we so strongly urge are what students need. Perhaps it's simply the habits of mind that a diligent student (regardless of age or school level) demonstrates that we need to instill in students. Certainly, each content area needs to focus on their own sets of skills because part of schooling is society's desire to create a well-rounded citizenry. Will all of my students apply their knowledge of Shakespeare in their future career? Likely not. Likely not ever in their lives will that come up again. But I will continue to teach it because that's what's considered important in my subject area and all students deserve access to that curriculum and content.

To the point of the question, though... I try to be realistic with what students will actually do for my class when they get home. I try to provide rationale for why we do what we do. At the same time, though, I also try to get my students to a point where they trust that I have a reason for doing what I'm doing, that I have a bigger vision of where we are going as a class. For instructional strategies, I try to put students into situations that, to the best of my ability and knowledge, mimic positions they might find themselves in later in life; I try to think about my subject area as a way to prepare students for the challenges they will face later: making sense out of difficult text, managing multiple projects, working together and solo to produce a set of deliverables, and the like. If assessments were aligned with those skills that we think students need for the job market, that would certainly go a long way. However, schools operate with each subject area only taking on their content. Students are never (or rarely, at best) asked to bring all of their knowledge to focus on solving a task. Instead, we create these tests that focus on one particular field of knowledge and only ask for that field's coverage. That being the case, it's not likely that creating skilled workers for our job market is the task for schools. Each level of school is getting students ready for that next level of school, not for getting a job unless students find themselves in a career study program (CCOC or something similar).
 * 1) Think about today's students and the potential professions they might go into. Which of these skills might each student need? How can we make sure that all students are prepared with the skills necessary to enter the 21st Century Job Market?

Since that's the case, teachers are left to grapple with this very troubling question on their own: since we know students likely will not go into our content area for their career, how do we teach our content area *and* help create someone who is ready to jump into the work force? Add to that the idea that we really only have out best guess for what skills are needed there. Does someone need to be a competent writer? What defines that level of competence? Does spelling count? No, really! I ask myself these questions nearly every day. As an English teacher, I feel especially unneeded when I have so few students who go on to study English. If most of my students are going to go on to Engineering degrees, why do we need to read //The Scarlet Letter//? Pushing further, am I preparing my students for the competitive market of summer mall/retail jobs or for their future career? Is there any overlap there? How can I know for sure? It would be useful for academia to have a grasp on whether or not the job of high school is to create work-ready citizens or to prepare students for the world of college. Since the answer is nearly always "Both!," we're stuck with the inability to be everything to everyone. So where do we focus? How can we teach what's important in our subject area (and I want to stress that those ideas, that curriculum, is very important regardless of the immediate application to the work world and that such application should never be the only interest of school, teachers, or students) and still remain relevant? I think for every person you ask, you'll find a different list of requirements and suggestions.
 * 1) What patterns are beginning to emerge between the various resources you’ve been exploring? How do these skills compare with the list you made in question 1?

The Common Core Standards discuss college *and* career readiness, so this is a good first step to figuring out the commonalities between both worlds and starting to decide how to focus on those skills. So maybe this is the statement that helps define the purpose of school as well as delineate the difference between those foundational and functional skills: "As students advance through the grades and master the standards in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language, they are able to exhibit with increasing fullness and regularity these capacities of the literate individual" (Source: Common Core State Standards Initiative). Advancing through and mastering those skills, that's foundational knowledge. Being able to do so with more and more sophistication, that's functional knowledge. Maybe? In part, [|differentiated instruction] is trying to do this. And so are [|IEPs] ([|shouldn't all students have an IEP]?). And I think the flipped classroom is another wave of trying to do just this thing, provide the exact level of support a student needs to progress. The more options teachers provide, in terms of assignments and assessments and instruction, the more students will feel like they can customize their experience to fit what they need. We have to be there, though, to help students understand that what they need and what they want are two different things! The more we connect our discipline to things that students will encounter in the world beyond high school, the more meaningful and necessary we make our curriculum. That's what 21st Century Skills are all about, asking teachers to focus not on content area exclusively and to embrace the fact that it's the whole kid we're educating, not just that small section of their brain that's dedicated to our subject area. Students need freedom to decide what matters to them and they need to know that what they think matters. At the same time, they also need to know that the system is set up to benefit them, not to punish or hurt them. That's not the point of the educational machine (even if I'm not entirely certain *what* the point of that machine is!). Assessment *should* be there to improve performance. Assessment is currently largely used to provide a score in the gradebook. It's an end point, not a beginning of the conversation. I'm guilty of this just as much as anyone else. An idea about [|using Google Drive (formerly Docs) to grade writing] by leaving comments on a student's submitted draft could be a way to move toward assessment as a conversation about performance. This style of learning is already changing the way classes happen. I'm not sure how much it will change a typical high school, though the flipped classroom is certainly a sign of this kind of change, but there will likely be more specialty settings with a march toward the [|School 2.0 vision]. The idea that students don't need to sit in one spot during one block of time to get the information they need is something the web has been so powerful at delivering, yet schools act as if they didn't see this coming. I mean, that's almost the entire message of the internet: we bring the information to you when you need it. I hope that will become the mission statement of more high schools as the technology develops and we can start to give students more freedom. Trouble happens when we need to decide at what point the traditional school house model has worn off its welcome. Do we allow 1st graders to access information whenever they think they need it? Or is there some value in the traditional model that needs to take hold before we allow for autonomy? Not so much! There's a flexibility described both in the student and the environment that's missing from nearly every traditional high school, a schedule that's the overwhelming majority of schooling students experience. There's a section titled "From Isolation to Connection" that I found myself nodding my head to the entire time. And it made me think of a related idea, one that I think is insanely important, that teachers need to be learners, too. They need to either be learning something in their subject area, creating new areas of expertise, pushing their own understanding further, or some other way that the teacher is continuing to learn. Sharing that with students makes them feel like there's honestly a community of learners at their school and in their classroom. That connects back to Prensky's idea that a culture of respect and a commitment to educating the whole child (not just being concerned about that child's development in your subject area) are key. I am a teacher, but I read this anyway. Here are my thoughts: "goal-oriented and able to pursue multiple outcomes at the same time" I disagree. I think students *want* to do these things, but they don't do them very well. There's been some discussion about how multi-tasking teenagers actually are not able to do what they think they can, that they do indeed need to focus on one thing at a time in order to get it done and do it well. I think that, while some of the generalities about students in this article are true, I don't think students are as organized in their skills and desires as the article suggests. Students may very well be skilled in these various areas, but I believe that the majority of students aren't sure about how to apply these skills and to what ends they want to dedicate themselves. Tthe gist of this article is that students are different from what their teachers think. That I certainly do agree with. There are 3 questions listed and the article goes on to say that schools perhaps aren't ready to deal with those questions and I think that's true. I like this graphic. It seems to be a good way to summarize these skills commonly referred to as 21st century learning skills. Looking at the words around the Venn diagram, the biggest gap I see is in reflection. Teens often do not think about what they have done or why they did it; they often just act without consideration for the reason behind their decisions. That's just where they mental development is and it's not necessarily a bad thing - that's just how it is. It's a sophisticated notion to think about why you do what you do. The next gap is flexibility and tenacity, students who are comfortable grappling with something that isn't quite what they expect and who are willing to keep on trying no matter what. It may be that creating situations in the classroom where students care about what happens as a result of the project would help close these gaps. Effective Learners: As I mentioned above, I think students quite often aren't reflective and don't think about their thinking, that level of meta-recognition of the world around them. Again, that's a sophisticated skill that students regularly need to be lead into and encouraged to participate in. It's the piece of regularly engaging in this skill that I need to push for more in my classroom. We occasionally find ourselves in a spot where this kind of reflection is a requirement, but it's not something I hit every single time and likely not as often as I should. Effective Communicators: Part of this domain also includes creation of content. While students certainly create content for themselves, there often isn't a space for that type of creation in the classroom. I was amazed when I saw what students had created online as a trailer for a student event, a fairly polished view of the yearly event and one that encourages participation and viewing of the event. It was really amazing editing and filming and music... very well done. I rarely see that kind of quality or creativity in a student project. There's a gap between how students think about technology for personal projects and how they think about them for academic projects. I want to close that gap more and more each year. Effective Global Collaborators: The idea of engaging with "students of different cultures inside and outside school" is something we need more of. Sure, there's a mix of cultures in any given classroom and most students need to navigate the way those cultures work -- at least enough to complete whatever task is in front of them. But what I see happen more often than not is tolerance and not acceptance or even understanding. The difference there settles around an appreciation for those differences. And that touches on the ways groups work together and the knowledge that students take away from any group experience. At one level, there is simply the acknowledgement that there are needs not being met. Just knowing what those needs are will help teachers and schools design ways to meet those needs. It might be that there are plenty of schools and teachers out there who don't see these needs. My school, overall, is probably fairly average -- which is to say that it's not doing such a great job as an institution to meet these needs because they don't see the needs. Schools and teachers are fairly locked in to the way things have always worked. Those changes that are coming down the line, though they mean there are a few ahead-of-the-curve teachers and schools working to meet those needs, won't be addressed by most schools and teachers until a few years later. For my school, the more I can be vocal about the need for things to change, and others that share my opinion can join me, the quicker those changes will happen. I see the biggest barrier being the focus on AYP/API/APR and the entire testing craze. That in your subject area very hard to do and the expectation is that those scores drive what we do on campus. Additionally, the Common Core Standards are going to bring literacy into many other subject areas, so it would seem that a focus on literacy, an obvious focus that anyone observing your classroom could actually see and not just infer, is a must. Those math and social science and science teachers are going to be pretty upset if they see English teachers starting to shift focus onto something else. But it's gotta happen! We need to stop teaching a class that's designed for miniature English majors. And it's not that these skills are necessarily exclusive, but that there are a lot of things to keep in mind; that's a whole other layer of post-rationalization I need to go through for doing with the students what I know needs to be done. I need to justify meeting the standards, justify college/career readiness, justify parent/student needs, justify district/school needs, and justify 21st Century Skills needs.
 * Module 2 Notes**
 * 1) How can we make personalized learning a part of our schools and classrooms?
 * 1) How do we help our students become real learners?
 * 1) What is/should be the role of assessment in student learning? How can we improve upon our assessment practices in order to really help all students be engaged, life-long learners?
 * 1) What is the role of e-learning, and how will/isl this change(ing) the educational paradigm?
 * 1) How do your students compare with the 21st Century learners described in Mark Prensky"s article on "The 21st Century Digital Learner"?
 * 1) HotChalk’s article on 21st Century Learners ? If you are not a teacher: How do you as a student or your children compare with the 21 Century learners described in this article?
 * 1) To what extent to you see your students (or your children, or yourself as a student) possessing the qualities shown on thegraphic on the wiki for the International School in Bangkok? If you see any gaps, what do you consider the reason for these gaps, and how might educators help students gain these skills and qualities?
 * 1) To what extent are you, your children or your students Effective Learners, Effective Communicators, and Effective Global Collaborators.?
 * 1) To what extent is your school (or your children's school) and classroom meeting these needs?
 * 1) How might you rethink your classroom to make it a 21st Century classroom? What are the barriers you face to making your class a 21st Century learning environment? If you are not currently teaching how should classrooms be re-thought?

It's hard to begin the shift to such a radically different learning environment when schools have less and less money to spend each year, when walls are already constructed, when desks have already been purchased, when textbooks already line the shelves... so how do you embrace the idea of a more open schedule, online textbooks, project-based assignments, flipped classrooms, and the like? Dealing with what we have in front of us, and this has been my mantra throughout this course, we deal with a 53-minute block and try to do the best mix of what's-coming-next with what's-here-now. I find teachers who are willing to experiment with technology, who are willing to experiment with lesson plans, who are willing to collaborate and then try things out each year.
 * Module 3 Notes**
 * 1) List how your school and classroom environments support 21st Century learning outcomes. If you are not teaching, think about your school experience of the your children's school. Consider:
 * the extent to which faculty at your school collaborate, share best practices and integrate 21st century skills into classroom practice
 * students learn in relevant, real world 21st century contexts such as project-based and applied learning experiences
 * students experience equitable access to quality learning tools, technologies and resources
 * to what extent architectural design of your classroom creates space for for group, team and individual learning
 * to what extent you provide opportunities for both face to face and online interaction with community members and experts in their field for your students
 * to what extent does your school and classroom reflect the 21st Century Learning environment

That idea that we are teaching kids who will inherit a world very different than the one we're in now is something we need to consider deeply. Until we can reach some kind of agreement on that, and until we can figure out how to prepare for standards and tests that *do* exist today, we're never going to embrace the idea that we need to think about skills that are aimed at something higher than content-area knowledge specific to today's problems. This responds to the first 2 questions: It's hard to collaborate with other teachers because teachers all have their own fiefdom that they don't want to give up: "sure, I'll work with you, as long as I don't have to give up anything that I want to do." And that's hard ground to start from. Assuming that you have a group of teachers who want to work together, the scheduling becomes an issue as the size of the school and number of possible electives increases. I have some teachers I'd love to work with, but I can't be assured that all of my students in English will have that teacher for US History and who knows which teacher those students will have for whatever level of math and science they are taking. So that narrows the interdisciplinary action that can happen on any given project. The idea of competency-based education really is something I struggle with in English. We're not a subject area full of discreet skills that can be demonstrated and then checked off a list of skills. Thesis statement? Got it! Nope, that doesn't happen because for every new situation, there's a new way to write that thesis statement. It doesn't work like math where there's a routine to find the correct answer every single time. So the competency-based approach, while I think it could work and a colleague of mine spent some significant time on this last year, isn't one that we've adopted as an entire school (was this idea covered in the readings, by the way? I don't recall coming across this but maybe I scanned past it or didn't click on a link somewhere). As I mentioned above, I've wrestled with competency-based education in the past (I [|wrote about it] long, long ago...) and I'm playing around with the idea of flipping some lessons that seem to fit into that model. I've tried to focus my courses around a [|central question] and that can lead to projects based on that question. I fully admit that this is a weakness in my instruction. I rarely avail myself of community resources. The biggest step I've done toward that end is that all of my writing assignments, major writing assignments that require taking a piece of writing through the full writing process and turned in for a polished writing grade, have been current and real writing contests (except one topic which was a recently expired contest but just too good a prompt not to offer it!). As a result, a few of my students have thought about writing in ways they never would have before because the audience was different. Goodness! That's a rather large and broad question! I suppose that if I fully knew the answer to this, I'd already be doing it. But I think that focusing on those skills more consciously is a good move. As was brought up in the discussion board, first step: try! Give these things a shot and be willing to experiment with ideas that might push me and my students in a different direction.
 * Module 4 Notes**
 * 1) In what ways are your assuring that the 21st century skills taught discretely in the context of core subjects Is your curriculum interdisciplinary? If you are a middle or high school teacher how can you or do you collaborate with teachers in other departments to create multidisciplinary projects?
 * 2) How does your curriculum focus on providing opportunities for applying 21st century skills across content areas and for a competency-based approach to learning?
 * 1) What instructional strategies do you use to enable innovative learning methods that integrate the use of supportive technologies such as inquiry-based, project-based and problem-based approaches as well as promote higher order thinking skill?
 * 1) How do you encourage the integration of community resources beyond school walls?
 * 1) How can you better integrate 21st Century skills into your curriculum.


 * Module 5 Notes**
 * 1) What are the best uses of technology to promote student learning in a 21st Century Classroom?

//This is the comment I just left and realized it addresses this question, too:// Really, regardless of the exact project, the idea of more problems driving the projects that are assigned (and my instruction taking a cue from what students need in order to complete the project) is integral to any kind of further integration of these skills.

//Adding to that:// The best uses of technology are those that come naturally from the desired result and not from some errant need to use technology. In the same way that we need to move toward a better understanding of what skills students need to do well in the future and how our subject areas can all serve that need, we need to move away from the push to have more computers in the classroom and more SMART boards and more iPads without any idea how to use them. As I've said repeatedly here, the awareness of what we are preparing our students for goes a long way to achieve this end. Thinking in terms of problems or inquiries or projects, those key types of lessons that have been the focus of the readings, almost forces teachers to address those 21st century skills simply as a natural way to help students through the task! That's a huge part of what I like about those types of assignments because it's easy to segue into a stronger focus on those [|7 Cs].
 * 1) What strategies can teachers use to assure their students are acquiring the 21st Century skills necessary for their future?

I think these ideas would work just fine in the US: Lots of student breaks, kids encouraged to play outdoors, experimentation in groups, autonomy, innovation,<range type="comment" id="66257"> very good people into teaching, 10% of applicants accepted (I wonder what percentage we accept in the US), quality teacher training, open spaces in the schools, environment that encourages collaboration and group work (that's why I want to get rid of my desks!), system is about how students create knowledge together, students can opt out of an academic track and instead focus on learning a particular skill, institute a basic national curriculum (cut the CCCSs by at least half, I say!) and allow for teachers todevelop their own curriculum outside of that To sum it all up: cross-curricular projects are the best way to do this. Education has become a system that operates in fixed realms. We're now feeling the impact of the painful dissonance between the way academia and the work world operate. The result are students who don't think your curriculum matters, who aren't paying attention, who think they have a million better things to do, and who aren't giving it their full effort. We need to plod toward a place where we can give students time to work on a project or group of projects that they can bring every subject area to bear on and then deliver instruction that's needed in order to complete the project(s).
 * Module 6 Notes**
 * 1) What aspects of Finland's educational model work in the United States?
 * 1) How can we best reshape education so that all students gain the skills they need to live and work in the 21st Century?

<range type="comment" id="325206"><range type="comment" id="265307">My final project will be my 20% Time project, stolen from [|Kevin Brookhouser]who stole it from [|Google] who stole it from [|3M]. Here's a bit more about [|the concept].