P21 Webinars announced “”The Implementation Challenges of 21st Century Education: 7 Steps for Schools and Districts.”

  
 For nearly a decade, we have focused on developing a new model of education worthy of our 21st century students. Most of the attention has been focused on what our students need to know and do. But precious little attention has been focused on how schools and districts can make it happen. What does implementation of 21st century education really look like?

In order to help schools and districts with this work, P21 and EdLeader21 have teamed up to present an 8-part webinar series: “The Implementation Challenges of 21st Century Education: 7 Steps for Schools and Districts.”

The webinars will cover the following topics:

1. Adopt Your Vision - April 24, 12pm PT/ 3pm ET
2. Create a Community Consensus - June 6, 12pm PT/ 3pm ET
3. Align Your System (TBD)
4. Build Professional Capacity (TBD)
5. (a) Focus Your Curriculum
6. (b) Focus Your Assessment (TBD)
7. Support Your Teachers (TBD)
8. Improve and Innovate (TBD)

Join EdLeader21, P21, and district leaders from Kentucky, Colorado, Virginia, and Tennessee for a fascinating discussion of the role of a 21st century vision for education for the first webinar in the series:

Please register ASAP! Don’t miss out!    

New Book from PLP Press: Connected from the Start

Been watching Sheryl Nussbaum Beach’s company PLP press lately? They are doing good things. Here is their second book published under their own label PLP Press:

New digital book: Connected from the Start

I am very excited to announce that Powerful Learning Press has just released its first interactive eBook: Connected from the Start: Global Learning in the Primary Grades!

In this 120-page eBook, primary teacher Kathy Cassidy makes a compelling case for connecting our youngest students to the world, using the transformative power of Internet tools and technologies.

This book includes:

• Dozens of color photos
• 10 short videos
• Hundreds of links to helpful downloads and resources
• A peek inside Kathy’s classroom showing practical applications of the concepts in the book

Save on this book

Use our coupon code CONNECTEDKIDS at checkout to save $2 on this book. One week only, expires April 17. Go to shop.plpnetwork.com/connectedkids to buy now.

Want to preview before you buy? Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 at our Voices from the Learning Revolution blog.

Living in the Infinite, Not the Finite.

The other day my friend Paul Wood tweeted an interesting quote from a fellow named George DiGianni:

“If you live in the question you are infinite, if you live in the answer, you are finite.”

I really liked that quote. To me, it sums up the differences between Problem Based  and Project Based Learning. Project Based Learning, by definition, begins with the end in mind. The final product, whatever it is, is already known to the learner. What exactly the final project looks like is up to the students and may vary from student to student or group to group, but the end is clear. In “real life” I suppose that there are quite a few situations where this is a valid form of thinking. An architect is designing a house or a store. You have been asked to make a bridge, or build a robot, or  design a 21st century classroom.  The end is always clear.  (Of course there are levels and sublevels and the true definition of a project based unit has sort of melted over the years, but I think the idea of Project Based Learning remains the same: The project is part of the problem and is already pre-defined.) 

I have had difficulty in actually truly defining what constitutes actual projects in Project Based Learning. Of course, we all know that since it is a constructivist model of learning that the student is the discoverer of the learning, instead of the teacher being the all knowing distributor of learning. Kids get to learn for themselves, which I think is the better approach to learning. But when the end is already determined, one wonders how much true learning is already taking place, and how much is the students previous knowledge is actually just completing the assignment. For instance, I can recall science labs that were used to demonstrate a concept that actually could be pretty much figured out without even doing the lab. Chemistry class was the worst at that. The reactions were discussed prior to the lab, and if one merely read the book or paid attention to the teachers notes, one could figure out the results of the lab without even doing it. For instance, if we talked about precipitation reactions and the teacher talked about the sodium sulphate reaction with copper(II) chloride, and then we DID the sodium sulphate with copper(II) chloride in a lab, we knew that we will get a particular colored precipitate whether it worked or not. We were living in the answers in chemistry. We already knew how the answer was going to look.  We already knew how the frog would look before we dissected it, we already knew that the plants would move towards the light after we discussed phototropism. For much of what we did in science labs, we lived in the answer, and I suspect that still is the case. 

Read More

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century

I haven’t had time to read this report yet, but I thought I would post a link to it so that you all could read it on your own. So here is here’s the information about it and links to the actual report.

NAS071012 from FedNet on Vimeo.

From the site:

Business and political leaders are increasingly asking schools to integrate development of skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration into the teaching and learning of academic subjects. Collectively these skills are often referred to as “21st century skills” or “deeper learning.”

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21^st Century, a new report from the National Research Council, more clearly defines these terms and lays the groundwork for policy and further research in the field.

The new report: