Recently on another teacher blog (Weblogg-ed) teachers are ranting about the new skill sets our students will be asked to tackle. I wonder what we are doing currently in our classrooms to enhance these skills? Are we as successful products "traditional" skill set value system ready to make a paradigm shift?
This following is excerpted: [entire post]
Our kids’ futures will require them to be:
- Networked–They’ll need an “outboard brain.”
- More collaborative–They are going to need to work closely with people to co-create information.
- More globally aware–Those collaborators may be anywhere in the world.
- Less dependent on paper–Right now, we are still paper training our kids.
- More active–In just about every sense of the word. Physically. Socially. Politically.
- Fluent in creating and consuming hypertext–Basic reading and writing skills will not suffice.
- More connected–To their communities, to their environments, to the world.
- Editors of information–Something we should have been teaching them all along but is even more important now.
4 comments:
This isn't realistic because it can't be tested.
So students should only be taught what can be tested? Tests mean next to nothing, plently of people are bad test takers but know more than the people who constantly get perfect scores. How often do you need to take a multiple choice test in the real world? Answer: Not very. If anything we need to become less dependent on tests as a basis for measuring achivment.
I'm not suggesting that we only teach for a test but how can you asses that you are teaching these skills without some sort of test? Teachers have to be held accountable for what they are doing with students.
That's true. There does need accountability. If students need to be taught new things tests should change as well, to mirror what they need to learn. The inside of a classroom hasn't changed in a very long time, maybe it is also time to update how students are taught.
Post a Comment