The latest fad to sweep the wonderful world of pedagogy is called 21st Century Skills
In the land of American pedagogy, innovation is frequently confused with progress, and whatever is thought to be new is always embraced more readily than what is known to be true.
old-fashioned or traditional, these terms being the worst sort of opprobrium that can be hurled at any educator.
"it is no longer important what bits of information a student knows, but only that students be able to locate information" in the new 21st Century model...
I have never thought content knowledge was unimportant. I have just wanted it applied and therefore retained through some relevant application.
Unfortunately the field of pedagogy is subject to frequent bouts of infatuation with fads and of lemming-like behavior in adopting the latest fad as holy writ.
Jones wanted black children to "learn to do by doing," which was considered to be the modern, scientific approach to education.
This deeply ingrained suspicion - hostility, even - towards subject matter is the single most significant reason for the failure of the standards movement in American education over the past generation.
WOW! All of the staff development I have taken has been for the sole purpose of disengaging the student. Excitement over learnning stuff - what a waste of time!
We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically unless one has quite a lot of knowledge to think about.
So the critical thinking comes only after you have the content knowledge? Who decides when one has the requisite knowledge? Graduate studies advisors?
Doctoral thesis committees?
We need to take the education of poor children as seriously as we take the education of the rich, and we need to create systems that routinely guarantee all the elements of educational investment to all children.
"don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test but whether they possess twenty-first-century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity."
HOPE? How long will we hope? This reminds me of the need to wean ourselves from foreign oil....It was Nixon that first started talking about the "Absolute Neccesity" of energy independence. I want to be hopeful and I want to do what I can, but I have to say I am not optimistic.
I came across this at a Promethean workshop during a discussion of using images to Bloom-up the discussion. This was part of explaining the SUCCESSs model in Made to Stick. It costs, but I might try to see if it can geneerate some ewww, that's so gross, yet I am fascinated....learning!
This is probably not new, but the self-assessment caused me to really think about my edu-community and more importantly, how I contribute to the findings and what I might do to be a part of any positive change.
I ran across this in AFT's American Journal. It sites Dianne Ravitch's essay "A Century of Skills Movements". I'd like to take a closer look at the arguments made re skills vs. content as the focus. It this creating a straw person? I thought the goal was that student's learn modern day skills while acquiring the content.