Twenty-First Century Schools Committee

In a recent blog post, Superintendent Dennis Richards reflects on the world his grandson will inherit.

He concludes that:

“I am convinced, as MIT apparently is, that collectively we have an opportunity to pool intelligences globally in ways we cannot imagine today to answer the questions of tomorrow. We have to claim these opportunities and help our students to claim them. I suspect it may be the only way we will be able to live creatively and successfully in a world that could be very different from the one we are equipped to live in, a world that is rapidly disappearing.”

He shares excellent links to 21st century literacies that various organizations have identified, and asks what mental models we have that are preventing us from making the shift.

Increasingly our world operates on “collective intelligence”– we not only can create or think alone, but work together with others whether in a meeting room or virtually across the globe to create and plan for our schools, businesses, and organizations. The book Wikinomics identifies how that dynamic is changing economies and cultures rapidly.

This YouTube video, which a colleague of mine shared, explores the questions those changes raise.

How will our students find their voice in all the “clutter” of worldwide contributions? How can they make money? How will they weed out what is true and what is not? How will they collaborate as part of their future lives? What literacies will be the most important to them?

How do our policies at our schools reinforce (or not reinforce) changes in mindset that need to happen?

And how do we figure out if the changes we are making are helping us make progress in working on 21st century learning strategies?

Those are questions our committee has asked and continues to ask. What do you think?

Edutopia has an interesting feature article in the June issue of their magazine on a school district in Indiana that is taking on changing their curriculum and teaching practices to meet 21st century skills.

http://www.edutopia.org/fast-forward 

Karl Fisch, who blogs at Fischbowl at Arapahoe High School in Colorado, writes about a gathering his school held with local business leaders to discuss what 21st century skills their students needed.

It was an interesting list and similar to what our Vision committee’s “Research” group has been finding.   A few that we hadn’t talked as much about in compiling our own list of 21st century skills–

They mention the idea of flexibility several times–flexibility in being creative, flexibility in learning from each experience, etc.

Another skill they listed is the ability to listen.

A third skill they call for is self-reflection and the ability to recognize and play to your own strengths.

How does this article fit into our work as a committee?

Edutopia has an interesting article about creative ways to establish better relationships with students on campus.   Well worth reading as we talk about the ‘relationship’ part of rigor, relevance and relationships.

We’ve been talking all year on the committee about innovation and ways to support that on campus.   The University of Southern California has started a new institute for innovation, the USC Stevens Institute,  to support innovation across departments.  The idea is to have a university-wide resource to support innovators, not just in terms of funding, but in terms of helping innovators make connections.

Business Week interviewed the head of the institute, Krisztina Holly, who comments:

 It’s about empowering the innovators and getting them connected with the right people—and creating a community from within and also outside the university with experts from business. It’s about having a shared sense of enterprise.

She talks about the value of reaching across departments including art, music, film, etc.  As she points out, “That’s what’s so cool about innovation; it’s the common language between academia and the marketplace.”  The institute isn’t just focused on business projects, but on community projects as well.

She shared some tentative survey results which found that over 50 percent of their students have had an idea while in college that they thought would make a good business.

It strikes me that having some sort of support for innovative projects at a high school would be a great idea as well.   An innovation club?  A innovation subset of the Vision committee?   Wouldn’t it be great to have a nationwide or statewide “Institute for Innovation in Education?” 

Any ideas on what we could do on campus to incorporate this concept?

It’s been so fascinating to sit in our Vision committee meetings and other conversations and start watching a new vision for our campus unfold.   We’ve reached the point in the year where we are already putting things in place that we were just dreaming about in the fall, and it’s really exciting.   New courses are already in the offerings for students, we’ve got a technology plan for the next year or two along with a logo and a motto, we’re addressing bringing guest speakers into our campus, we’re looking at some global focus, we’re redesigning the library space, and more. 

This afternoon I was reading a post on Will Richardson’s blog, Weblogg-ed, about a project he is working on with some schools in New Jersey, redefining a twenty-first century vision for their schools, and he listed the skills they are defining and I thought–that is like what we are doing!   And it made me feel very excited to know that we’re coming together with parents, students, and staff to define our 21st century and also technology goals to address how society is changing.

Take a look at his post and I think it’ll be interesting to follow their progress, but I’m hoping we can also do more to document our own progress, maybe here on our blog?

It’d be a great record of the development of our ideas and perhaps provide some model for other schools.   So share your thoughts or progress here if you would like.

This post, Prisoners of Time, is a fascinating summary of a study done on issues with time in schools–covers everything from time for teachers to learn to time of the day that students are ready to learn.  Well worth reading as we talk about the school schedule.

Recently we’ve been discussing the ideas we saw at High Tech High, and Edutopia has an excellent article this month about another new project-based school in Philadelphia, the Science Leadership Academy.    Well worth reading about.

Chris Lehmann, the principal of SLA, blogs about the evolution of the school, leadership issues, technology problems, and more at his site Practical Theory if you’d like to follow the school’s progress.

I”ve been rereading a chapter on design in Daniel Pink’s book Whole New Mind this afternoon (sitting on the porch, since it IS spring break.) and was thinking about creativity, design, and schools.

Then I ran across this video on TedTalks of Sir Ken Robinson talking about education and creativity.   His words rang true:

“Kids will take a chance and if they don’t know, they’ll have a go….They’re not frightened about being wrong….I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative, but what we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

Robinson thinks we are educating people out of their creative capacities.   We educate all students as though they are going to be professors; we educate them in the head only.  He feels this isn’t going to serve our students in the future.

Students think they should take practical courses based on what they will do as a job, and the whole education system around the world is based on university entrance, so it tells a whole group of students that they aren’t talented, because their talents lie elsewhere.

He’s writing a new book called Epiphany about how people discover their talents.  The video is a fascinating conversation starter.

The Washington Post reports on how difficult it has become for colleges to communicate with their students, because of the myriad of communication pathways.  

Students no longer have land lines in many colleges, change cell numbers frequently, and may not check their campus email often, since they prefer instant messaging or Facebook.

A couple of universities are experimenting with letting students sign up for emergency text alerts to their cell phones, while others are letting them tailor what the college sends to their email, so they’ll know it pertains to them.

I was at a lecture on campus recently and realized how many students in the lecture hall were working on laptops while listening to the lecture.   Colleges are having to address how technologies are changing the classroom in ways high schools are not yet.  But my question is–are we preparing our students to be successful in these kinds of environments?