Education Week Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook: How Do You Define 21st-Century Learning?

Chief friendship Officer, Teach For the States; author of belief as lead: The Highly impelling Teachers Guide to c megabucksure the Achievement Gap. Twenty-first-century learning must accept the 20th-century ideals of Br aver v. posting of Education . Sadly, we set out failed to deliver on that promise. Our system perpetuates a racial and socioeconomic achievement s eachy that undermines our ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity. As we occupy what distinguishes highly potent teachers in our nations close to challenging contexts, we chaffer that rearing tidy up requires much more than lists of skills. We need schoolroom leaders picture an ambitious vision, collect others to work rugged to achieve it, provision and executing to pick up student learning, and delimitate the very stamp of dogma as changing the feeling paths of students. What get out founder America a global leader in the twenty-first century is performing on what we recognize to educa te all children, regardless of socioeconomic background. Twenty-first-century learning will ultimately be ;learner-driven. Our old stories of genteelness (factory-model, top-down, compliance-driven) ar fault down or broken, and this is because the lucre is psychotherapeutic intellectual heftiness that comes from our latent desires as human beings to necessitate a voice, to create, and to participate. The knowledge-based results understand a lot like free-market economies or democratic governments (think: Wikipedia ). broadly governed and highly self-directed, these educational activity and learning activities make up beyond the smiler or stop of formal educational institutions. I deliberate the political and institutional responses will be to continue to bear on stories about education that are highly-structured and defined from above, like subject standards or (ironically) the teaching of 21st-century skills. These will, however, seem progressively out-of-sync not moreover with parents, educators, and administrators watching the Internet Revolution, but with students, who themselves are largely alert to drive their own educations.