21st century reading
Next week’s issue of Time has an important feature article for our committee–
“How to Bring our Schools out of the 21st Century.”
For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.
The article raises many interesting discussion points, some of which are about to be released next week in a report by a bipartisan commission on education, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.
The article complemented many of the things we have been discussing and gave some great examples of what schools throughout the country are doing.
Thoughts on the article? Ideas?
December 13, 2006 @ 11:40 am
The article gave me a good chuckle, and seemed headed in a good direction, on beam with the direction of our committee.
If we don’t want our public schools to be a place where Rip Van Winkle would feel right at home, then we are going to have to invest in making some challenging and courageous changes. The skills needed for 21st Century success cannot be acquired through an educational model that traps students in their individual desks for most of the day, listening in silence to well-meaning but interminable lectures. Success in today’s world requires highly trained communication skills, and a proven ability to do good work both individually and collaboratively, in a variety of dynamically changing environments. These skills cannot be adequately acquired in a Rip Van Winkle classroom.
Our problem is that the RVW classroom is a well known approach, an approach which is of proven effectiveness in helping upward-mobile, left-brained students to do well both when completing AP classes and when taking college entrance exams.
If we are going to move beyond this model, we will need careful and thoughtful planning. We must be careful to fully support teachers as they acquire the skills and develop the teaching activities that will empower 21st Century learning. We must also be careful to involve our local, statewide, and national communities in a public conversation about the changes we are making.
The article started by focusing on the concept of “Public Conversation.” Exactly. We must have public conversation around the issue of 21st Century education if we are to move forward in this area. For one thing, the schools of the 21st Century need to be about building partnerships and coalitions in their communities. We need to model what we want to see. For another thing, if we try to make changes within Westlake High School without involving the Eanes ISD community in the process, our changes will never take root or lead to genuine progress.
My present research is suggesting some specific ideas for generating a productive public conversation in our community. My hope is to share these ideas in a future blog, Lord willin’ and if the creek don’t rise, as Rip Van Winkle might say.
December 15, 2006 @ 8:22 am
Landon,
I agree with you about supporting teachers and inviting the community if we want these changes to really be meaningful.
I ran across this post on Karl Fisch’s blog at Arapahoe High School in Colorado, and he is pondering the Time article as well and makes some great points.
Good reading !
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/12/its-about-time.html
Carolyn