Part I: More Thoughts on "21st Century Education"

Sometimes I get stuck before I get to the start of a project. For this assignment we were asked to watch two video clips. Why did I hate the first one, Chatham High School, so much? The fact that I did hate it really bothered me. Does this mean I’m not 21^st century material? I don’t know why, but I found this very sad to watch. Maybe it was what I saw as the pomposity of the two men (Teachers? Administrators? I don’t believe it was ever said) who said things like:

We have to be interactive, because they are accustomed to sitting in front of a screen and having 5 windows up, and talking to 3 people at the same time. etc… 

We can’t possibly expect the learner of today to be engrossed by someone speaking in a monotone voice with a piece of chalk in their hands.

When would you have ever expected this? It’s true for me that some of my best teachers have also been very entertaining in their presentations, but it was the teacher and not the tech. I’ve had plenty of poor and boring teachers that tried to spice things up with bad, but flashy, presentations. I’ve seen some very engrossing presentations by someone with little more than a piece of chalk to create the visuals.

      To walk into a classroom that doesn’t have all the media must be like walking 

into a desert.

WTF, does this teacher have short term memory loss? He can’t remember what it was like a few years ago?

Or maybe it was the smugness of the student who was using SparkNotes that creeped me out.

I can’t remember the last time a read a book… I use Spark Notes… it’s a legitimate source. I can read the whole book in a few pages. I guarantee that if you ask 10 kids if they read, 8 will say they Spark Note it—  and the other two probably don’t even read. 

Some of what’s espoused in this video seems to conflict with the Common Core Standard Initiative referenced by Professor Bigsby: http://www.corestandards.org/. Maybe I totally missed the point and I wasn’t suppose to think this was being put forward as an example of good integrations of technology into a school? For example: From the Myths & Facts section:

Evidence shows that the complexity of texts students are reading today does not match what is demanded in college and the workplace, creating a gap between what high school students can do and what they need to be able to do.

With so much contradictory ideas I’m not yet sure where I stand. Is it possible that the smug student who is so self righteous in using Spark Notes instead of doing the hard work of reading really is as likely to fail in college and life as he sounds? If anyone has a totally different take and wants to share conflicting views I’m ready to listen, so feel free to comment. Perhaps I’m just jealous of a wealthy district that can afford technology that will put their students on the fast track to future success? Perhaps I react against it because I’m afraid I won’t be able to use the technology effectively?

I was relieved when I watched the second video, Integration of 21st Century Skills: Hydrology on the actual use of ideas from the 21^st Century Skills Movement. I did find this one really interesting. I’m always interested when I see creative ways that teachers have made the content come to life for their students. However, I believe the learning here had less to do with the use of technology and more to do with incorporating ideas such as: Students working cooperatively, doing lots of group work, collecting and working with real data, applying what they are learning to the real world, global awareness, scientific enquiry, coming up with hypothesis, doing authentic tasks, and applying them to new situations. In this lesson, the use of technology enabled the students to get more out of the lesson. It was used as part of a toolbox of techniques, which I think is what it should be.

I really liked what one female student had to say (not to mention the adorable adolescent way she expressed herself):

When you’re learning just to learn— like a group lecture style and taking notes and stuff— most people aren’t, like, exactly that interested, especially in high school. They’re just doing it to pass the next test and stuff, and ,like, people were really getting involved, they are really listening, really paying attention and really getting something out of it. We’re actually able to remember these things and apply them in different areas because we’re really remembering them and, like, able to make deductions.

I think this is a pretty cogent critique of what I find wrong with a lot of education (getting students to do the work just so they can pass the next test) and a description of what a good classroom feels like (students actively involved in their own learning). 

I also liked the teacher’s final thought:

When my students do real work, authentic kinds of tasks,where they’re doing something that is real for the school or the community they now understand why this is important, how valuable it is to their own lives and to the community… When you have students doing meaningless work you’re pretty much saying: they’re not really important. But if I give you something important to do you’re an important member of the community and I value you. It’s a different mindset of what schoolwork is about.

This reminds me of a discussions about competency in my Cultural Awareness course. Often we see students as lacking in something-- especially if their language skills or knowledge of the world is lower than ours. However, frequently they have areas in their lives where they are very competent and tapping into this and the interests they have to help them learn is much more effective than treating them like they have no existence outside of the classroom and teaching them as if they were empty vessels that for some reason were broken and don’t fill with our teachings the way they should. I think the effectiveness of this description of 21^st century education vs the 1^st video puts in stark relief the banality of too much of the so called 21^st century pablum.

However, on a skeptical note, the devil is in the details. How much of this can you realistically incorporate into each class?  Done well it’s very time consuming. Students need background information to understand. Only so many projects don’t require more background info than can be imparted in a short time leading up to a longer term project. How can this best be balanced? Is incorporating a bit of this enough? How much? Also, when all students are working with the same data, how much more “authentic” is their experience of this kind of project? Some have questioned the value of expecting students to act as “little scientists” when they don’t have the background knowledge to work with. I hope we will be exploring some of these questions in this course.