I was subbing a class today and some kids started playing around and had the discussion above. I grabbed my camera and recorded it. For all of it’s humor (and Joe’s pretty funny), I’d also argue Joe raises some important points.
More later.
Tag: 21stcentury
Tether your ideas or history will ignore you too
Chris made a comment the other day to the effect that buzzwords are more than buzzwords in the hands and minds of people who can play with big ideas. It was a statement that had been buzzing around in my brain for quite some time.
Here’s the exception – 21st Century Learner/Teacher/Skills/Anything. Imagine if teachers had said at the outset of the 20th Century, “Let’s develop a skillset we believe important for all students in the country to master, and then build schools around those skills.”
Wait a minute! That’s exactly what happened, and we’ve been fighting against it since the start of the panini effect that Friedman guy’s been yammering on about.
I understand how calling there things 21st Century _________ makes for some sexy packaging, but two things happen:
- We risk looking more stupid than we need to a hundred years from now.
- We create the false illusion that the things we need to be doing in education now are somehow different from the things we’ve needed to be doing in education forever.
New Zealand’s Interface Magazine has the ridiculously named “Eight habits of highly effective 21st century teachers.” Andrew Churches lists the habits as:
- Adapting
- Being Visionary
- Collaborating
- Taking Risks
- Learning
- Communicating
- Modeling Behavior
- Leading
You think naming them “Eight habits of highly effective teachers” would be misleading?
Churches opens with:
What are the characteristics we would expect to see in a successful 21st century educator? Well, we know they are student-centric, holistic, and they’re teaching about how to learn as much as teaching about the subject area. We know, too, that they must be 21st century learners as well. But highly effective teachers in today’s classrooms are more than this – much more.
Now, that’s just silliness. Yesterday’s teachers needed those skills as much as today’s teachers need those skills as much as tomorrow’s teachers will need those skills. Again, I get the temptation to package these things in something a little more attractive that lends itself to highfaluting rhetoric where we talk about the loftiest of ideas.
Problem is, when teachers leave these discussions and return to their students, they need tangible examples to get them where they want to go. Finding out you’ve been sold nothing more than a big idea can lead to abandoning the idea for its lack of curricular tether. Man, I love a good tether.
Photo Credit: Jeff Monroe http://flickr.com/photos/43856553@N00/340408585/