Education 2.0 & 3.0

Engage your students in real-life problem solving with videos, STEM lessons, and long-term projects. Here are 10 ways to use them.

Leading by Framing the Conversation
A conversational leader directs and deepens thinking through questions, being mindful of how their questions frame the conversation. The conversational leadership matrix, below, is a model to help guide your speech. Each quadrant of the matrix tracks different ways to lead through conversation. Do we lean into asking or telling? Are we focusing on problems or solutions?

Education may be the passport to the future, but for all the good teaching out there, it would seem that schools are failing to impart some of the most important life skills, according to one educational expert.

Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group, argues that today’s school children are facing a “global achievement gap”, which is the gap between what even the best schools are teaching and the skills young people need to learn.

This has been exacerbated by two colliding trends: firstly, the global shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, and secondly, the way in which today’s school children – brought up with the internet – are motivated to learn.

In his book The Global Achievement Gap, Wagner identifies seven core competencies every child needs in order to survive in the coming world of work.

1. Critical thinking and problem-solving

A lot of people would agree on the fact that life is full of challenges. People become proficient enough when it comes to catering small problems or issues in hand. However, those who attain exceptional insights into problem-solving can gain success in the long run. Problem-solving can enable anybody to gain an edge over their peers and achieve more. The bigger the problem, the difference is the approach. We all are tasked with some form of problem-solving, whether it’s in our workplace or even homes.

Think about the last time you solved a business problem, such as coming up with a new product idea, formulating a new marketing plan, or deciding which job candidate to hire. How did you do it. Did you sit down with the facts and figures, make pro/con lists, and analyze the situation until you found the solution? Or did it come to you as a sudden insight--an "Aha!" moment, as some people call it?

It turns out many problems can be solved either of these two ways. But the two methods are not equal. In a fascinating experiment, a research team at Northwestern University led by Carola Salvi, set out to learn whether analysis or insight leads to better problem-solving. To find out, they presented more than 200 students at Northwestern and the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy were given various problems to solve that included word puzzles, anagrams, rebuses, and a puzzle where you had to identify a partial image of an object.

Our Big List of 21st Century Skills
The Global Digital Citizen Foundation has given hundreds of presentations to educators and administrators in several countries over the years. Each time we’ve spoken, we have asked them what they feel are the most important 21st century skills students need above all others.
The answers that we’ve recieved most often are narrowed down below. This list comes from our book Literacy is Not Enough (Crockett, Lee et. al.; 2011). You’ll be able to see that these points correlate rather well with both the New Zealand’s capabilities list and the IB Learner Profile. They certainly cover the Common Core’s bases, too. It’s good to know we’re all on the same page, isn’t it? That’s great news for our students!
So, according to the folks we’ve asked, the consensus is that students need to acquire transparency-level skills in the following areas:

Problem solving
Creativity
Analytic thinking
Collaboration
Communication
Ethics, action, and accountabillty

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/what-are-the-skills-needed-from-students-in-the-future/

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/the-new-possibilities-to-learn-and-teach-with-ict/

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/learning-path-for-professional-21st-century-learning-by-ict-practice/