Mind Lab - Week 2 - Digital - 21st Century Skills

Flipped Learning

Flipped preparation (required): Prepare for the session by watching the video "What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skill" and reflecting how 20th century and 21st century skills differ? Do we need both?

What are 21st century skills?

What were 20th century skills?

There are certainly some 20th century skills that are still required such as working alone - these are still valuable attributes. Listening to the teacher is also a good skill! Sitting still - there are times when you need to show resilience and just sit still through the most boring of activities - that is life. However, one the whole, 21st century skills are more valuable than 20th century.

21st Century Skills - from Mindlab notes
This week we open with some reflections on the flipped preparation video "What Can 60 Schools Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skills?" and discuss how do 20th century and 21st century skills differ? Do we need both? Some of the skills related ideas in the video include:

• Schools are becoming, creative, adaptive, permeable, dynamic, systemic, self-correcting
• The 5th sphere - the ‘cognitosphere’ - system of knowledge creation and management
• Problems - Anchors of time, space and subject, Dams and Silos
• Solutions -
• Teach into the unknown
• Self-evolving learners
• Self-evolving organisations

Education innovation - “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow” - supposedly John Dewey (though in fact Dewey never actually wrote that!)

Reflection

I think that in this Knowledge Age and time of Hyper Change students need a number of key skills including creativity, collaboration, problem-solving and inter personal skills.

In class our group (Toni, Georgia, Nick and myself) created a video about collaboration. We learnt a lot from the previous video where the view point of the video moved around quite a lot. This time we chose one vantage point and stuck to it for all of our shots.
We chose to write on a whiteboard table for ease of use. We illustrated our video with pipe cleaner people (thank you Toni), Nick filmed, Georgia uploaded and edited. Toni and I both wrote the text on the table, Nick and Georgia contributed some of the labels.

From the Collaboration flowchart I know that we

• worked together as a group
• shared responsibility (we collectively owned the work and were mutually responsible for the outcome)
• made substantive decisions (We had to plan the process of our work and decide on the workplan and roles within the team. No one told us who was doing what.)
• our work was interdependent. Without Georgia uploading and editing there would have been no finished product, without Nick filming there would have been no video and without Karen and Toni producing the labels and props there would have been no content. All of our jobs overlapped (we all produced some written labels and all co-constructed the narrative of the video) If we had each produced a separate part of the finished product our work would not have been interdependent. 

In my own practice there are a number of problems, frustrations, areas of concern

1. some students struggle to complete their own timetable each morning, others have done this before the day starts and are eager to get on with their work but are help up
2. during inquiry we have not been focused on learning the skills of inquiry, but too much on content. We are beginning to address this issue
3. some activities take too long, need too much time explaining and some students (who pick things up quickly) are getting frustrated and bored
4. Literacy activities such as NZReadaloud and Chapter Chat have not been valued at our school and substitution activities such as google doc versions of paper based reading responses are over valued. 
5. creative arts (dance, drama) do not occur often enough and need to be linked with literacy and inquiry
6. Literacy - viewing and presenting are not covered in as much depth as speaking, listening, reading and writing

How do the problems above relate to the Key Competencies or 21st Century Skills?

1. Self regulation, thinking, managing self
2. Real-world problems / innovations, Participating and contributing (collaborating)
3. Self regulation, ICT for learning, Managing self
4. Real-world problems / innovations, Relating to others
5. Knowledge construction, Skilled Communication, Using language, symbols & texts

I have had a few thoughts about the assessment and the problem to focus on. Possibly the inquiry skills or the timetabling issues. In order to choose the 'best' problem to investigate Toni and I are going to complete a 'Golden Circle' activity (Mark Osbourne) with our beliefs in the centre, design principles in the next circle and practices in the outer circle. This will enable us to identify what is going well in our ILE and what areas need to be tweaked. (Last year we went through this process to decide what was good to keep because we believed in it and what should go because it was not working towards our central belief of Empowering Learners for Life)

Questions

Why do we think this is the area we should work on? 

Do our students agree?

How do we know?

We need student voice in the decision making.