Learning+in+21st+Century

= Necessary Skills for 21st Century Learners and Workplace =

//Teaching is not rocket science.// //It is, in fact, far more complex and demanding work// //than rocket science.// - Richard Elmore, Harvard Graduate School of Education

The Key Elements of 21st Century Learning
//The Partnership for 21st Century Skills supports federal, state, and local initiatives to give students a solid foundation in core subjects and core content and to monitor progress with assessment and accountability measures. However, the Partnership feels strongly that other necessary pieces of an effective education are needed for the 21st century as well. Adding these key elements where they are missing--and measuring them with 21st century assessments--will make the core subjects relevant to the world in which students live and eventually may work.//

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is a unique public-private organization formed in 2002 to create a successful model of learning for this millennium that incorporates 21st century skills into our system of education.

Learn more in the Introduction Letter and Executive Summary from the Partnership's //Learning for the 21st Century// report.

Please read about the six elements of a 21st century education in Part II of the report: "The Key Elements of 21st Century Learning." = =

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21st Century Fluency Project
//This resource is the collaborative effort of a group of experienced educators and entrepreneurs who have united to share their experience and ideas, and create a project geared toward making learning relevant to life in our new digital age. Our purpose is to develop exceptional resources to assist in transforming learning to be relevant to life in the 21st Century.//

//T////he 21st Century Fluency Project is all about change. In today's world we face technological applications in daily living the likes of which, even a few short years ago, would have been inconceivable. This is a digital age, with interactive devices storing and recording our life experience and containing overwhelming amounts of knowledge. This has become the essence of life in the 21st Century, but more specifically the lives of our children. As students, they have a whole new way of thinking and learning that many educators are unable to understand, and that most schools are unable to accommodate...//

//The 21st Century Fluency Project is a collaborative initiative that was created to develop exceptional educational resources to assist in transforming learning to be relevant to life in the 21st century. Our mission is simple - to instill awareness of the importance of the change that is happening today, to help educators understand the need to "catch up" to today's students by re-evaluating current instructional and assessment methods, and to provide guidance in how to make change a beneficial thing for both student and teacher.//

Explore more about the five literacies at []

For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.
//Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.//

//Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.//

Read "The Creativity Crisis" (Newsweek) to get the full story.

[[image:Frustration.gif width="200" height="197"]] When was the last time you were frustrated?
Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving and Creativity: All have an element of frustration. So how do teachers provide an environment where frustration has time to give way to the critical thinking, problem-solving, and eventually creativity leading to a solution? One teacher reflects on this conundrum of teacher guidance and student independence regarding creativity in the classroom. At the end of this blog post, a video on creativity prompts further reflection on how the creative process works. Click here to read this post

//One key competency that employers across-the-board value in employees// //is the ability to think creatively and logically// //in order to solve problems.// //Such employees are most likely to be promoted in an unforgiving global economy// //that requires flexibility and an ability to develop new skills.// //The ability to think, speak, and write logically, to solve problems,////and to synthesize information are also priority competencies cited by// //post-secondary faculty members from all disciplines.// - The American Diplomacy Project

Rethinking Learning: The 21st Century Learner
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Getting Specific About Critical Thinking
//"Everyone supports the idea of teaching students to "think critically," but I’ve met very few teachers and administrators (and even fewer people outside academia) who have a clear idea of what they want students to do when they engage in "critical thinking." Usually the definition is tautological, such as "teach kids to reason" or help students acquire "higher order mental skills." Some very fine educators will say, "We teach them to ask questions." But asking questions or engaging students with the "Socratic method" is not the same thing as teaching critical thinking. Neither is getting students to define concepts such as "influence" or "control," as I saw one school claim. That exercise may help students begin to reflect on their own opinions but it doesn’t train specific intellectual skills."//  In his EdWeek article, Daniel McMahon targets the concept of critical thinking--pointing out that although the term is used frequently by educators, it is rarely defined enough to be useful to classroom practice. McMahon outlines that critical thinking is more than memory and recognition; instead, it is a process of pattern recognition//,// evaluation, and judgement. Click here to read this short article.

Why We're Behind - What Top Nations Teach Their Students, But We Don't
A report showing that the nations that consistently outrank us on international comparison tests provide their students with a fulsome education in the liberal arts and sciences.

//Each of the nations that consistently outrank the United States on the PISA exam provides their students with a comprehensive, content-rich education in the liberal arts and sciences. These nations differ greatly with regard to how they accomplish this goal. Some have a national curriculum and standards but no tests, others have both, and some leave everything up to the states. Interestingly, no state-based nation in our sample currently has a national curriculum or standards, though one is attempting to develop some.// //So what is the common ingredient across these varied nations? It is not a delivery mechanism or an accountability system that these high-performing nations share: it is a dedication to educating their children deeply in a wide range of subjects.// (Excerpt: Letter from the Executive Director)

Read the complete report: [|Why We're Behind:What Top Nations Teach Their Students, But We Don't]

Click on the following link to read a challenge to the Partnership of 21st Century Learning from the Common Core.

Attention, and Other 21st Century Social Media Literacies[[image:att_literacies.JPG width="308" height="234" align="right"]]
The author of this article, Howard Rheingold, focuses on five social media literacies.
 * Attention
 * Participation
 * Collaboration
 * Network Awareness
 * Critical Consumption

He considers "attention" to be fundamental to all the other literacies, the one that links together all the others. Although the article places great focus on the literacy of "attention," none of these literacies live in isolation. They are interconnected.

Read "Attention, and Other 21st Century Social Media Literacies" (educause.edu) to find out more.

21st Century Skills as a Vision for K-12 Education
//This story is about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education...whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good formation from bad, or speak a language other than English.// - from "How to Build a Student for the 21st Century", TIME Magazine (December 18, 2006)

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(The quality of the sound is very poor. You may want to "mute" your computer, and click through the slides.)