21C Teacher Skills
The pace of innovation and the rapid digitization of the physical world will challenge students who are not prepared to success in such a world. Before students can learn their important survival skills, teachers need to embrace them and think about how to drive them into their subject areas. I plan to expand on the skills below, in future blog posts.
- teachers need to be interactive, so that their class is interactive; even a backchannel would be useful first step
- teachers need to be able to search and curate online resources (spend time improving your craft and not just creating a worksheet that already exists
- teachers need to continue to confirm and refine their knowledge
- teachers will have to design their own curriculum for recent advances and innovations because the textbooks will lag (consider not using textbooks anyway)
- teachers need to develop their own PLN (without a network of resources, is the assumption that you are the best and smartest resource in the world)
- teachers need to be collegial and share resources, as well as, success and failure stories
- teachers need to be curriculum designers (understanding a concept is not sufficient to be able to teach it well)
- teachers need to design lessons with multiple learning pathways
- teachers need to know what skills they are teaching (e.g., Blooms Taxonomy)
- teachers need to know how they will motivate students during an activity or project
- teachers need to foster deep thinking
- teachers need to design projects and lessons by working backwards from the learning goal
- sample lesson would be to let students read and discover all of the rules of grammar (instead of declaring them and rote practice)
- teachers need to reflect on their teaching style and continually improve it
- teach a class to a different grade level or a class in a different subject
- be careful, the deeper you get into a subject, the more ingrained you become in the teaching techniques of YOUR instructors
- teachers need to craft open-ended projects
- associate content with current information
- example is to let students follow Twitter feeds of people who share characteristics with historical figures being studied
- teachers need to have resiliency to do a new project or a project with technology that is new to them (take a risk)
- teachers need to understand how to use a broad range of technology
- teachers don't have to be experts, but they at least need to "talk the talk" to relate to their students
- teachers need to understand the concept of cloud computing
- teachers need to help students take responsibility for their learning (like a coach)
- teachers need to help students create their own curriculum
- teacher need to organize classroom procedures to more closely resemble a business
- example is to run your writing class like a newspaper and students have different roles; their collaboration is authentic, like the "reporter" who challenges the "editor" to get a different topic
- teachers need to increase the value of student work, so it s relevant and useful in the next week, next month, next semester and next year
- teachers need a range of teaching strategies because each class will require their own set of them
Change
My thoughts on change come form a keynote presentation by
Michael Edson, the Smithsonian's Director of Web and New Media Strategy. It is well known that the vast majority of changes (70%+) end up failing - including people with a life-threatening illness who don't change their lifestyle. The failure rate is even higher for new restaurants and educational reforms. In the latter two cases, the organizations are a particular combination of people and beliefs (aka the culture) and it is difficult to transplant or replicate.
Change may also be difficult because the goal is a moving target. What will the world like be in 3 years? What will the world be like when a newborn retires in 65 years? Teachers need to improve (by changing) and prepare students for an unpredictable future. Below are some half-baked thoughts about change.
- Michael has a great motto: think big, start small, move fast and he has a presentation that discusses technological change
- understand the process of change
- understand the characteristics of successful changes
- for example, many successes had a sense of urgency in common
- don't rely on "lasting wisdom", which is what you know continuing to provide the same level of advantage
- most innovation happens at the "edge" of the organization (away from the powerful core)
- good ideas may come from inside the organization, but some or all will come from outside the organization
- key questions
- what kind of change?
- underground/grassroots or strategic
- what kind of innovation?
- new product/service
- improvement of existing product/service
- product improvement is different than process improvement
- need extraterrestrial auditor, who can be real:
- brutal honesty
- need BS detector
- what are the outcomes?
- how to prove?
- predict which projects will succeed and which will fail
- some success
- watch out for survivorship bias
- change is an endurance sport
- not everyone will be supportive or be able to change
