A Mission Driven Curriculum for 21^st Century Learners

As we enter the second decade of the 21^st Century, schools worldwide continue to struggle with the challenge of teaching our children what have been described as 21^st Century Skills (Stuart, 1999; Dede, 2000).  These are the skills that students will need to be successful and productive members of society in the decades to come.  What are those skills?  How are they different from 20^th century skills? What role does technology play in teaching and learning those skills?  How does our school’s Mission Statement guide us in meeting this challenge?

In many ways, the skills that are considered essential for success in the new century are not new at all.  According to the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (2009), the leading educational body advocating this approach, the skills include the following:

• Creative Thinking: the ability to create new ideas
• Innovation: the ability to turn those ideas into new action and products
• Critical Thinking: the ability to measure the quality of information and act accordingly
• Problem Solving: the ability to apply what one knows to new situations (Honey, 2005)
• Communication: the ability to listen and express ideas effectively through video, audio, animation, as well as on paper and in person (Honey, 2005)
• Collaboration: the ability to work with others for a common purpose

It would be difficult to argue that these skills are new or that, not until 10 years ago did individuals need to work together, solve problems or be creative.  The fact is that they are not new at all, but that schools typically do not consider them the most important aspects of a child’s education.  Schools in the 20^th Century were much like schools in the 19^th Century, filling students with knowledge and teaching them how to get good grades.  Students learned to listen to the teacher and repeat what they heard.  So, what has changed?  Why is that no longer enough?  Technology, and the explosion of information that it has brought, has fundamentally changed the main purpose of school.  School used to be the place students had to go to learn things.  School was where the teachers were, where the books were and where students’ peers were.  Now, one can gain knowledge of any subject; find facts and knowledge in unlimited amounts, all through the Internet.  One can find many experts, thousands of teachers and millions of peers, all on the Internet.  Any book a student might want to read can be purchased or downloaded from, yes, the Internet.  School is no longer the place students need to go to gain knowledge.  The recent focus on 21^st Century Skills is an attempt to shift our goal from knowledge acquisition to skill acquisition.  And, not just any skills; it is shifting our focus to those skills that are required specifically to deal with the explosion of information that technology has brought.

At the opening of the century, with the advent of the interactive web, or Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005), the nature of knowledge and information changed radically.  No longer was there simply a rapidly growing amount of factual knowledge (which presented enough of a challenge to schools and teachers), but there emerged the added aspect of feedback.  Web 2.0 is characterized by the ability of individuals to voice their own opinions and interact with the web.  Our ability to comment on news stories, argue and debate the facts and present different points of view has challenged the notion that news is “just the facts”.  Our ability to share our knowledge and have others verify or challenge its accuracy, in forums such as Wikipedia, has changed the way we look at the notion of an expert.  Our ability, through blogs, wikis and tools like twitter, to create our own knowledge and share it on a global scale, has both increased the amount of information and made it nearly impossible to trust the veracity of any sources of information.  Now that anyone can have a voice and nearly everyone does have a voice, the notion of expertise is more and more elusive.

The dawn of a new century has therefore brought with it several fundamental changes in the way we communicate, changes in our individual ability to innovate, create and share and new opportunities for global collaboration.  This has, in turn created an ever-greater need for us to think critically about information and data in order to solve real-world problems.  This is the difference between what students needed 20 years ago and what they need today and will need in the decades to come.  They need to learn the skills, the 21^st Century Skills, to actively and productively participate in this global knowledge boom.  They need to be creators and innovators.  Sitting back and listening is no longer enough.  They need to join the conversation, give opinions and listen to others.  We cannot tell them anymore who the experts are.  They need to be able to judge that for themselves.  They need to work together, not just with their classmates but also with people from different countries and cultures.  They need to learn how to learn because they will need to learn new ways of finding information as technology tools change (and they are changing daily).

At AIS-R, our mission states: “…we will educate and inspire our students to be responsible, productive and ethical world citizens with the skills and passion to think creatively, reason critically, communicate effectively, and learn continuously.” Through this statement we acknowledge that our students must have creative thinking skills, critical reasoning skills, and must innovate, communicate, and collaborate in order to be responsible, productive and ethical global citizens.  Our mission then directs us to target those 21^st Century Skills.    We do so using the same Technology tools that have necessitated the change in focus:

• We provide students with opportunities to publish their work to wider audiences, via the web
• We encourage students to comment on and provide feedback to peers when their work is published on the web
• We have them use email to communicate
• We have them use Blackboard to participate in class discussion forums, outside of class
• We provide them with tools like Discovery Streaming for learning
• We teach them to create videos to communicate their learning
• We challenge their thinking by teaching them to find multiple sources to back up their facts
• We insist that they have accurate, cited sources to back up their work
• We challenge them with problems to solve rather than simply asking them to repeat the facts
• We provide them with opportunities to use digital tools, the Internet and online communication forums to increase their exposure to information

We also realize that there is more that can be done.  In order to be successful 21^st Century learners, students need further opportunities to participate in online communities and harness the power of online networks.  We must provide them with safe opportunities to do so in school, to experiment and to fail, before they need to rely on these tools for their livelihood.  We have to give students more opportunity to guide their own learning, to tell us how they learn best and to allow them to use the tools best suited to their individual needs.  With a myriad of digital tools for learning an infinite number of subjects, we have no excuse to not allow for that kind of individualization.  Conversely, we must also harness the power of digital tools for collaboration and teach our students to work together on common goals and for the improvement of the group.

Are we adequately preparing our children for the 21^st Century?  Our Mission Statement guides us by telling us what we want our students to become. Our student’s needs inform our teaching and tell us what they need to learn to fulfill that Mission.  Technology challenges us by creating an ever-changing landscape of knowledge and skills to be learned but it also enables us by providing the very tools we need to navigate that landscape.  Our mission-driven approach, supported with the right technology tools, will ensure our children’s readiness for the future.

Sources:

www.21stcenturyskills.org. Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004. Web. 15 Feb. 2010.

Stuart, Lisa, et al. 21st Century Skills for 21st Century Jobs. A Report of the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Labor, National Institute for Literacy and Small Business Administration. 1999. ERIC. EBSCO.

Dede, Chris. “Emerging influences of information technology on school curriculum.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 32.2 (2000): 281-303. Professional Development Collection. EBSCO.

O’Reilly, Tim. “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (2005)

Honey, Margaret, et al. “Critical Issue: Using Technology to Improve Student Achievement.”    http://www.ncrel.org/ sdrs/areas/issues/methods/technlgy/ te800.htm#skill (2005)