Building Understanding

It began when Tara and I took on the task of articulating our ISB21 curriculum’s standards and benchmarks.  I voiced it in a single tweet:

Okay, some background…

Our task is to ensure that the thorough standards from both ISTE and AASL were completely represented, while remaining true to one of our original tenets:

To be a successful curriculum, one that will truly be part of students’ educational experience, it must be accessible to teachers.

This was very important to Justin and I as we began to develop our ideas and remained important to the whole ISB21 team as each member joined the conversation.  Eventually, ISTE and AASL caught up with us and now its a matter of fitting their great work into our original framework.  But the premise remains.  Past models – the best they could be in their time – generally failed because teachers did not believe it was their job to teach technology.

Now, of course, we realize that technology is merely part of a much bigger conversation about Communication, Collaboration, Innovation, and Thinking.  Online conversations, articles, video mash-ups, and tweets emerge constantly extolling the virtues of a 21st Century Curriculum for 21st Century Learners.  I know…I’ve posted a lot of them.  And we have plenty of credible backing – take ISTE, AASL, Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future,  or the IB Learner Profile to name a few.  They all tell us what we want our kids to turn out like.  They all remind us what we need to value in education.

But we don’t.

At least not in action.  (GENERALIZATION ALERT:)  Schools continue to push content-driven curricula.  Teachers continue to plan lessons building expertise within the discipline.  And if students get our “21st Century Skills”, it’s because of an exception-to-the-rule teacher, choices the students make outside of class, or just plain luck.

We all know that what we need is buy-in.  We see the success stories, celebrate the schools that do it, and ultimately wonder, what does it take to make it work everywhere?  Buy-in.

So back to the teacher accessibility issue.

How do we ensure that teachers see teaching a 21st Century Curriculum as part of their job?

Our way has been to remind teachers that they have ALWAYS valued effective communication, collaboration, innovation, and thinking in their students.  Only the media and the degree to which each is possible have changed.

How we communicate, collaborate, innovate, and think IS different.  Or rather, it can be different.  We still need the ways of the past, but have added ever-changing/growing ways of the present and future.  This is the core principle of our 21st Century Skills.  They are actually 20th Century skills, maybe even 18th Century skills, only they use and will continue to use 21st Century tools.

So how do we build a real and enduring understanding of this?

Half our problem may be the terminology.  On the blogosphere (or is it “in” the blogosphere?), we all know what it means when we say “21st Century”.  It comes embedded with all sorts of extra implications, meanings, connotations, and suggestions.  We understand it, because we’ve read blog posts that converted us, seen videos that shift our understanding, conversed with global colleagues that re-shape and/or affirm our thinking, and joined 100-comment conversations that engaged us so much that we changed the very way we perceived the world, the learner, and our role in education.

But does everyone else get all that when they hear “21st Century skills”?  How could they?  They lack our experiences and our scaffolding.  Not only does it fail to carry the same perspective-shifting connotation, but at worse, may even send a message of “you neither value how I learned nor how I teach.  You are telling me that what I value is not valuable.”

Perhaps that is an extreme view, but it may not  be far from the truth.  In our efforts to spread the gospel, we do our best to explain the significance, but if we want buy-in, let’s remember our audience.  Let’s tap into what our educators already buy into.  They are professional, care about kids, and want their students to succeed.  They understand and value good communication, critical thinking, and collaboration.

Don’t put them off with catch phrases and “excluding” words.  (why do we do that , by the way…blog, wiki, tweet, glog, vlog, apps…are we trying to confuse everyone?)

Instead, remind them, it’s about adapting what they already value to a world that requires new ways to do them.   Remind yourselves that your teachers have ALWAYS been trying to prepare their students to succeed in the world they will live in.  And then collaborate with them on how that world has changed.

As for what we call it instead.  I’m open to suggestions.

Stay tuned.

Image, Future or Bust, by Vermin Inc

Image, Into the future but now without the past, by janusz l

I am at the EARCOS Admin Conference in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.

I have just come out of the room after presenting the I.T. Curriculum 2.0 presentation that Justin and I developed a year ago and its newest iteration.  Was a great turn out and a wonderful conversation.  People offered terrific insight and questions and it is an awesome reminder how smart the people running schools are.  And it’s an honor to start a conversation with them about rethinking how students learn and what they need to learn.

(Click on the Presentations tab to get to my wiki to see notes and resources from the presentation.)

What’s additionally cooler though, is having a colleague like Jeff who live blogged my whole session to his audience and created a back channel conversation on all of those thoughts.  Thanks Jeff.  Check out the unbelievable conversation that happened online, live as I was presenting.  Talk about shared learning!

Next presentation on Tuesday, 13:45 my time which I believe is GMT +8.  Looking for Learning – How supervsiors can foster best practice technology use.  The more I’ve been talking with administrators, the more I see that this is something a lot of schools want to know more about.  I’m excited.

Okay, so I concede right off the bat that by posting this link, I am cementing my status as a geek.  I guess the good thing is that among this crowd, that ain’t such a bad thing.

From Wired’s GeekDad section, I came across this post citing a University of Wisconsin Milwaukee study write up on PhysOrg.com that links instilling confidence in young girls with success in math and science.  No surprise there, of course, but certainly nice to have the hard data.  The three year study looked at the barriers and supports for girls in learning and pursuing math and science.

While interest is certainly a factor in getting older girls to study and pursue a career in these disciplines, more attention should be given to building confidence in their abilities early in their education, says UWM Distinguished Professor Nadya Fouad. She is one of the authors of a three-year study aimed at identifying supports and barriers that steer girls toward or away from science and math during their education.

“The relationship between confidence and interest is close,” says Fouad. “If they feel they can do it, it feeds their interest.”

Do our teachers and parents get this?

Are they not only providing opportunities for ALL students to learn, but also help them become confident young people?

If kids, as GeekDad’s Vincent Janoski suggests (and most of us believe), that a secure child does better in all things, then how much of what educators do is directed at this part of the child?

If we KNOW this works, why isn’t making kids confident and secure a bigger part of our curriculum and the needs of a 21st Century Learner?

Com’on sing with me now, “message in a bottle…message in a bottle…”

Justin, Kim and I have been invited to join Dave Carpenter and Jeff Utecht for an S.OS. Podcast. The Shift Our Schools podcasts look specifically at how, why and what schools need to do to answer to the shift that is happening in technology, the world, and hopefully in education.

This particular podcast, we will be focusing on the question, “How Do We Connect Technology and Classroom Instruction Seamlessly?”

We’ve presented at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai and ETC in Kuala Lumpur on our work at ISB on moving towards an embedded curriculum focused less on tech skills and more on the 21st Century skills that you read so much about in the edublogosphere. We wrote about our thinking in our blogs and as guest bloggers on Dangerously Irrelevant. We’ve put up our work to share and collaborate with in wikis, initially in newliteracy and then as an ISB21 team.Now we are excited to take questions, speak to solutions, and tackle issues that relate to implementation on these very Big Ideas.

Hope you can come by and tune in.

From their site:

SOS is a biweekly podcast produced by educators in the Asian region discussing the latest conversations in the educational blogosphere as well as deep thinking about education and the changing nature of learning. Join us on Ustream.tv for the live broadcast. Listeners will have an opportunity to Skype into the conversation “on the fly” as well as listen to an archived version via iTunes.

This blog typically focuses on technology and learning. This time, I am going to branch out into an area that I know less about…art learning.

Last week, a colleague shared an article by Project Zero Principal Investigators Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland.

The article, titled, “Art for Our Sake: School arts classes matter more than ever – but not for the reasons you think“, was a terrific read. (pdf here)

It certainly got me thinking.

Winner and Hetland ask “Why do we teach the arts in schools?”

They argue that despite popular opinion, they had not found causation between arts learning and academic achievement. They cite a Gallup poll that 80% of Americans believe that learning a musical instrument improves math skills.

Winner and Hetland claim that their research in some schools in Boston show that while corelation exists, causation does not. Following up on this and reading around, this gets disputed places, to which they have responded. I’m going to focus on the points in this article.

Interestingly Winner and Hetland refute the commonly held idea ideal that learning the arts improves the math and science learning that schools often focus on in “a test-driven education system”. Instead, art education is valuable for more important reasons:

There is, however, a very good reason to teach arts in schools, and it’s not the one that arts supporters tend to fall back on. In a recent study of several art classes in Boston-area schools, we found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum.

They go on to add:

In our analysis, we identified eight “studio habits of mind” that arts classes taught, including the development of artistic craft. Each of these stood out from testable skills taught elsewhere in school.

The other 7 habits are persistence, expression, making clear connections between schoolwork and the world, and in their words, “we were particularly struck by the potentially broad value of four other kinds of thinking being taught in the art classes we documented: observing, envisioning, innovating through exploration, and reflective self-evaluation.”

I have written before about the need for a thinking curriculum – one less focused on content knowledge.

But let’s think about those last four skills: observing, envisioning, innovating, and reflection.

These are the powerful skills that we talk about constantly as required in our 21st Century Learners.

Here’s what Winner and Hetland had to say about each:

• Observing - “Seeing clearly by looking past one’s preconceptions is central to a variety of professions, from medicine to law. Naturalists must be able to tell one species from another; climatologists need to see atmospheric patterns in data as well as in clouds. Writers need keen observational skills too, as do doctors.“
• Envisioning - art teachers were asking questions “prompting students to imagine what was not there.“
• Innovation - “Teachers in our study told students not to worry about mistakes, but instead to let mistakes lead to unexpected discoveries.“
• Reflective self-evaluation – Students are “asked to step back, analyze, judge, and sometimes reconceive their projects entirely.”

These are the skills – the only skills – that will allow our students to change the world for the better.

I’ve done a lot of quoting this post, so I’ll let Winner and Hetland’s words finish it off:

We don’t need the arts in our schools to raise mathematical and verbal skills – we already target these in math and language arts. We need the arts because in addition to introducing students to aesthetic appreciation, they teach other modes of thinking we value.

For students living in a rapidly changing world, the arts teach vital modes of seeing, imagining, inventing, and thinking.

Those who have learned the lessons of the arts, however – how to see new patterns, how to learn from mistakes, and how to envision solutions – are the ones likely to come up with the novel answers needed most for the future.

Image “je dois apprendre aux curieux” by drunkprincess, found at Flickr Creative Commons

It’s ETC time again.  This year the conference is in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – my old stomping grounds.  Lived there 8 years, got married there, and 2 of my 3 kids were born there.  It’s going to be fun to be back.

At the conference I will be presenting the new literacy curriculum ideas that Justin and I started and blogged about in a 5 post appearance as guest bloggers on Dangerously Irrelevant and here (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) on Thinking Allowed.  This work in its initial phase was presented at the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai in September.

Since then, other great minds (not that our own were great) have contributed to refining it to an awesome starting point for an embedded technology curriculum that focuses on thinking rather than technology.  We have formed an ISB21 team to build it, support it, and enact it.   We still have work to do, but it’s coming along nicely.

Kim Cofino, from Always Learning is part of that team and will also be presenting in KL on “Developing the Global Student: Practical Ways to Infuse 21st Century Literacy in Your Classroom”.

If you are going to be in KL this weekend for the conference, I hope that you can swing by that session and my own workshop:

IT Curriculum 2.0, Session V, 11:45-12:45, Johore Room.

How does and information and technology curriculum stay relevant and meaningful in the 21st Century? In the face of exponentially changing times, old I.T. Scope and Sequences became outdated the moment they were printed. Schools need an embedded I.T. curriculum that ensures that the way students learn with technology agrees with the way they live with technology. It must focus on habits that provide students with opportunity to succeed not matter what their futures hold. This session shares a new model that speaks to these habits and makes 21st Century Learning accessible to teachers and students. Begin the conversation here and continue it at your schools.

Hope to see you there, if not at the workshop, perhaps at the pub!

Okay, it’s complete out-of-the-box thinking time.

Why do schools teach what they do? 

Really, that’s what I’m asking…what’s it good for?

How is the content curriculum that we teach kids helping them?

(And I am not accepting any version of “it prepares them for the next level of school.”)

In older posts on this blog, I’ve written that school curriculum NEEDS a major shift: (whole post here)

21st century learners need thinking skills. They need to be able to find, process, and evaluate information that is EVERYWHERE and always accessible. They need to be able to participate in an interconnected, wired world in effective and responsible ways. They NEED to be taught how to manage/handle/thrive amidst all of the information that is out there and continuing to grow.

Our allegiance to English, Science, Math, and Social Studies as core curricular ideals and the end-all-be-all in student learning needs to make room for higher order thinking, questioning, and information literacy.

And after sharing my thoughts on the NYTimes reported failure of a laptop program, I offered: (whole post here)

Our curricula of content mired in Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies is not preparing students for anything but further education focused on these same subjects.

What students learn needs to be different and how they learn needs to be different.

These are not unique ideas.  Throughout the edublogosphere in varying degrees, educators are talking about the importance of a 21st Century Curriculum (for lack of a better name).

So I ask this question, in light of the shared belief that a 21st Century curriculum focused on thinking, communicating and collaborating skills is necessary for a world in which knowledge is so readily accessible.

What is the point of the way current curriculum is setup?

More specifically, break it down into the classic subjects:

• Why do we learn Language Arts (or English in HS)?
• Why do we learn Social Studies?
• Why do we learn Science?
• Why do we learn Math?
• Why do we learn Art (performing and visual)?

(note:  I stick to these subjects, because Language learning seems to have an obvious practicality, as does Health/PE.)

Is this too bold to ask?  Can we defend what we do as schools?

No more, “That’s the way we’ve always done it” defense.

Out of the box time.

Prove that what we say we value is useful.

Truly no offense intended to any of these subjects and the educators who teach them.  I just want to hear from the experts what the right answers are.

Please feel free to answer any and all in the comments.

Image: “Question!” by Bast, found at Flickr Creative Commons

Also posted as a guest blogger on Dangerously Irrelevant 

So where do Justin and I go from here?

Over the past week we have taken some time to reflect on our process of creating a meaningful and usable framework for embedding “21st century literacy” into our school curriculum. Part 1, 2, 3, 4 sought to guide you the reader through our thinking and seek out feedback and friendly criticism. Blogs are such a great venue for conversations like this.

Our final post asks for advice on how to make it a reality.

Our framework was designed with the International School of Bangkok and its teachers in mind. While we feel it could apply to any educational setting we are not bound by any external curricular limitations other than that which the International Baccalaureate sets out in grades 11 and 12. Our school is heavily invested in the UBD (Understanding by Design) approach to unit/curriculum planning and as a result we have chosen to use “essential questions” to guide our framework.

To quote from an earlier post:

Looking at Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design approach to curriculum and unit design we liked how big “essential questions” and “enduring understandings” had helped us plan and design units when we were teaching math and social studies. What if this same “best practice” approach could be applied to the way technology was used and talked about in the classroom? If this was good curricular design practice, why should technology and thinking curriculum be any different? What if that same approach was used in the way we looked at connecting technology and learning across the curriculum? What if there were only a few manageable questions that even the most tech-resistant teacher could see value in?

Best practices regarding meaningful technology integration vary world wide. As technology is a real and relevant teaching and learning tool, we felt that our approach should leverage internationally-recognized best practices and current research if it was to truly gain acceptance in our school. Whether you use the new NET Standards as a framework or something else, it is important that you meet your teachers where they are and stay consistent with what is accepted and established practice in your own school environments.

When we walk into school every day we are confident that kids are learning how to read, write, and do math. Our teachers are trained to teach these subjects. We trust in their professionalism and in the belief that these teachers want to prepare students for their futures.

In our embedded curriculum model, we have tried to ensure that the nature of “what teachers have to teach” seems accessible to them and just as importantly doable – that the conversations involving technology are conversations that teachers are already having about truth, safety, communication, and collaboration.

But theory is not practice.

• What are the best ways to get teachers not only on board and trained, but fundamentally believing in the importance of including this curriculum into “the way they do business”?
• How do we get to a place where we have the same confidence in students learning information literacy skills as we do in the other subject areas?
• If your school is on the right track and doing this, how have you made it happen?
• What has been the tipping point to go from talking about it, to doing it?

This is where we want to go. We would like your input. It’s time for the collective intelligence of the Web 2.0 world to kick in.

None of us is as good as all of us.

Please chime in.

Thanks for joining us this week. (In particular, thanks to Scott for lending us his audience.)

We’ve enjoyed the conversation.

with Justin Medved

Cross Posted at: Medagogy and Dangerously Irrelevant