21st Century Skills
Chapters 1 and 2
What Is 21st Century Learning?
- Learning a Living: The Future of Work and Careers
- Crucial skills that need improvement: communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, technology and management.
2. Learning Through Time
- Contributing to Work and Society
- Fulfilling personal talents
- Fulfilling civic responsibilities
- Carrying forward values and traditions
The Perfect Learning Storm
- Four Converging Forces
- Knowledge Work
- Thinking Tools
- Digital Lifestyles
- Learning Research
"These four forces are simultaneously creating the need for new forms of learning in the 21st century and supplying the tools, environments, and guiding principles required to support 21st learning practices." (Trilling&Fadel pg.22-23)
Knowledge Work
- Done collaboratively in teams
- Spread across multiple nations and locations
- Uses multiple modes of technology (cell phones, web, databases, spreadsheets, ext.)
- Innovation and Creativity
Thinking Tools
- Digital Services
- Digital Devices
- Microchips
- Speed and transportation of information
Digital Lifestyles
- Overwhelming amount of AVAILABLE technology
- People who have grown up and live in the first generation of technology (age 11-31)
- Multiple uses of technology
- Lifelong immersion in technology=new set of desires and expectations
- Better multi-taskers
Learning Research
- Authentic Learning: "context, or the conditions in which learning activities occur."(Triling and Fadel pg.31)
- Mental Model Building: "recognizing what you already know from past experiences--and what you currently believe from the latest versions of your mental models." (Triling and Fadel pg. 32)
- Internal Motivation: when people have an emotional connection to what is being learned they have a better potential to remember what is being taught.
- Multiple Intelligences: encouraging diverse learning styles and approaches of the different students in your classroom.
- Social Learning: Learning is a social process that encourages students to use each other as boards to bounce off of and question.