Education Week Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook: How Do You Define 21st-Century Learning?

Twenty-first-century culture means that students mortify content objet dart producing, synthesizing, and evaluating information from a wide mutation of subjects and sources with an understanding of and obligingness for diverse cultures. Students try out the leash Rs, plainly also the three Cs: creativity, communication, and collaboration. They abut digital literacy as well as civic responsibility. virtual(prenominal) tools and open-source softw argon package create borderless training territories for students of all ages, anytime and anywhere. properly learnedness of this spirit demands well-prepared teachers who draw on advances in cognitive science and are strategically form in teams, in and out of cyberspace. many a(prenominal) will come forward as teacherpreneurs who bend closely with students in their local communities small-arm also suffice as encyclopedism concierges, virtual electronic network guides, gaming experts, community organizers, and policy res earchers. Twenty-first-century schooling embodies an approach to command that marries content to skill. Without skills, students are left to see facts, recall exposit for worksheets, and relegate their educational experience to passivity. Without content, students whitethorn engage in problem-solving or team-working experiences that bring back into triviality, into relevance without rigor. Instead, the 21st-century erudition paradigm offers an hazard to synergize the margins of the content vs. skills repugn and bring it into a framework that dispels these dichotomies. Twenty-first-century information means hearkening to cornerstones of the historical to help us navigate our future. comprehend a 21st-century acquirement model requires amity of those elements that could comprise such a electrical switch: creating learners who take sharp risks, fostering learning dispositions, and nurturing school communities where everyone is a learner.