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"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

Learning to write is one of the fundamental skills we gain from our time at school. Writing is one of the cornerstones of learning and we devote significant time and energy towards its mastery. Skilled writing is a mark of an educated individual and a skill required for academic success. But in the modern world what makes a skilled writer? What has changed about writing and what literary skills should we focus our attention on. 

"Critical thinking is a skill that we can teach to our students through exercise and practice. It is particularly a skill that contains a plethora of other skills inside it. Critical thinking in its basic definition refers"  to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with evaluating information as well as evaluating our thought in a disciplined way ". All of our students think in a way or another but the question  is , do they really think critically ? are they able to evaluate the information they come across ? are they capable of going beyond the surface thinking layer ? Can they make connections between what they learn and the outer world? Can they question the status quo of their knowledge ?"

Post by Mary Beth Hertz. She lists some skills by grade level that she aims to have her students obtain. Each skill is rated per grade as either an Introductory (I), Developing (D) or Applied (A) Skill.

From the Educational Technology & Mobile Learning blog "Enokson has created for us a kind of road map containing all the major critical thinking skills we need to know about. He put these skills into an image that you can download from Flicker. Here his image has been turned it into an infographic-like embeddable HTML code to use on your website or blog. Check the code below if you want to embed it on your blog but please if you are to use this link anywhere else online make sure to pay credit to Enokson.

Looking at the New Directions for school leadership and the teaching profession discussion paper, the only evidence presented to support the assertion that Victoria's education outcomes are not improving is the report "Challenges in Australian Education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students' reading, mathematical and scientific literacy" Specifically the New Directions paper focuses on reading literacy, where in 2009, 14,251 students were given a two-hour pen and paper comprehension test. To get an idea of what types of competencies the reading test is assessing we can look at the sample test , with questions range from comprehension about a letter in a newspaper, the ability to interpret a receipt, comprehension around a short story, an informational text, and interpreting a table. While it doesn't seem unreasonable to want our students to be able to accurately perform these kind of tasks, these tests are not a true or accurate representation of the skills and competencies our students need in today's technology driven world.

"Chart created by Andrew Churches in which he relates higher order thinking skills included in Blooms Taxonomy to different digital skills. The purpose is to highlight the importance of technology and digital skills in today's learning."

reducing our aims just to types of skills risks boring everyone to death with short lived, tool specific training which doesn't address the social and political context of people's lives or their reasons for engaging with technology.

Listing the traits that make an the ideal 21st teacher. Post tries to answer What does an educational professional need to be or do to tune in and synchronize with the new realities silently emerging inside schools and educational environments?

It is tempting to make predictions of the skills that our students will need beyond their time at school. Such wondering can be a useful guide as we contemplate what we shall focus on with our curriculum. Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of predictions for future skillsets published by educators, economists and analysts. What might we learn from such lists, and how should education systems respond?

In a heutagogical approach to teaching and learning, learners are highly autonomous and self-determined and emphasis is placed on development of learner capacity and capability with the goal of producing learners who are well-prepared for the complexities of today's workplace. The approach has been proposed as a theory for applying to emerging technologies in distance education and for guiding distance education practice and the ways in which distance educators develop and deliver instruction using newer technologies such as social media.

Helping students to cultivate the skills needed for writing is often about cultivating a love of writing. Every student needs to be able to express themselves clearly, concisely and intelligently, whatever they are going to end up doing in later life. "The best way to help them develop those skills is to make writing personal and give them a vested interest in communication. Blogs have become one of the most popular website formats in recent years. Blogging websites have become the essential ways for many people to broadcast their personal stories, challenges and insights. This has created both a new generation of budding writers as well as a generation with a keen interest in the stories of others. Blogging offers an immersive experience. Students are simply encouraged to begin a blog chronicling their life story or a subject that ignites their interest. That's when the skills are picked up and developed as a matter of course. The initial blogging assignment should be simple, but at the same time offer a bit of a challenge." Post offers some useful advice about blogging.

There is little interest in understanding the pedagogical foundation of higher education as a deeply civic and political project that provides the conditions for individual autonomy and takes liberation and the practice of freedom as a collective goal

"Ethical decision-making should be included as a 21st century skill (overused term but don't know of an alternative).  Some would profess that ethical decision-making has always been a needed skill.  But we are living in the most complex era of human history.  Information access and abundance, and emerging technologies are advancing, and being developed and disseminated at rates that the human mind often cannot comprehend.  Now more than ever ethics should be integrated into young people's educations."

Professor MacFarlane discusses many issues which ring true to me. In particular: - lack of vision for what education could be like with new technology (around 4 min mark) - the web2.0 and technology revolution is great for the 15% of people who have a good life anyway because of their suituation and culture (5:30) - others don't benefit from the access to the technology - they need help (6:00) - no change in classroom over last 20 years with computers and in danger of no change in next 20 years (7:30) - instruction vs. construction (8:30) - expect learning to change with introduction of technology (10:30) - but hasn't really done so - student self-directed learning is separate from school work i.e. at home and not related to school (14:30) - much of what kids do on computers at home is trivial (16:00) - the ones that do have good experiences are the same 15% (16:30) - kids that are missing out have a computer at home probably but no access to the community that enables them to have these experiences (17:10) - doing something by themselves does not really benefit them - it is being part of a community that had benefit for learning - what are we dong for these people? (19:10) - talking about missing pedagogical model for how to teach (22:00) - teachers are expected to use technology to provide innovative learning but no model against which to do so, some don't use it at all, some use it inappropriately - there maybe some individual examples but not overall (23:00) - schools bad at connecting with their communities in a learning sense (26:00) - talks about chinese online writing community and how they comment, collaborate (34:00) - community (47:30) - communitites aren't formed when people are brought together in schools etc. - need to have a common problem or interest (48:30) - Plant's definition? - in education the problem is because assessment is done individually (49:00) - so forming groups and sharing ideas is not attractive for students - worried about not getti

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is pleased to offer Route 21, a one-stop-shop for 21st century skills-related information, resources and community tools

Designed to assist teachers to help their students, Microsoft offers this a free 37 page ebook entitled Developing Critical Thinking Through Web Research Skills. The ebook presents strategies for teaching Internet search skills and strategies for evaluating information. The ebook also links to many additional resources for teaching web search strategies. There are strategies and resources appropriate for students from in early elementary grades through high school included in the ebook. AOf course it has many references to Bing and other Microsoft products, but overall it is a good resource.

There is growing interest from schools in the Maker Movement and Maker Education but with this have come some subtle misunderstandings about what it is all about. For one the modern maker movement is all about the mindset of the maker rather than developing a set of specific skills for making. The second confusion stems from a belief that the maker movement is all about the tools and the makerspace and that as such it involves large budgets.

Our collective ability to learn and by doing so, adapt to changing circumstances through the acquisition of new skills and dispositions is what Edward de Bono refers to as EBNE; Essential But Not Enough. - What then might education need as it develops a response to times of rapid change?