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What do we want each student to learn? How will we know when each student has learned it? How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?

Education, after all, isn’t an acquisitive process, an exercise in procuring and storing information. Instead, learning is a social process, one in which people get from point A – ignorance – to point B – enlightenment – through a messy combination of challenge, failure and consolidation. While there might be a few people who can (and should) take advantage of open-source learning models, there are, I suspect, far more who can’t. Information, in the absence of the ability to apply it, isn’t very valuable, as anybody who’s ever tried to fix their own car using only the supplied factory manual understands only too well”.

The Framework for 21st Century Learning stated, “We believe schools must move beyond a focus on basic competency in core subjects to promoting understanding of academic content at much higher levels by weaving 21st century interdisciplinary themes into core subjects” (2007). 21st century skills bridge the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of students from the core academic areas to real life application.

Technology has completely changed the way that we communicate and interact, the way that we learn and use information. However, our educational system still has not reflected this fundamental change, and remains reliant on what Renzulli calls “to-be-presented knowledge,” with teachers and textbooks as the gatekeepers of this knowledge. However, this doesn’t reflect how our society and our information structures work today. Renzulli argues that our educational system needs to adapt to the skills and technology that we have developed as a society in order to prepare our students for 21st-century jobs and for rebuilding America’s reputation as a birthplace for creativity, leadership, innovation, and development of new technologies. This can be done through using technology to improve the way that we deliver education, as well as what we are teaching students, and improving students’ engagement in the educational process.

States score a significant portion of Race to the Top points by opening up charter schools and pegging teacher pay to student performance—two features that are common in New York and D.C., but are virtually nonexistent in Iowa.

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to studentlearning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next dayor the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; andthey worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menacesof poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.