Tag Archive for '21st century skills'

Aggregating Content is a 21st Century Skill

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 4, 2009 in Education News. 2 Comments

EdWeek’s Steven Sawchuk files a big 21st Century Skills piece off last week’s Common Core event in the new Edweek.  It’s well-worth reading if you’re new to the debate and looking for a straight, dispassionate take on the argument over P21. 

Diane Ravitch has lots more to say at Bridging Differences, and the reader comments, as always, have plenty of caloric value.  Here’s CK Blog contributor Diana Senechal, for example:

It seems to me that P21 wants to promote advertising skills more than critical thinking skills. Make a commercial of your favorite short story. Make a soundtrack and video display for a poem. Make a Venn diagram, using online “concept mapping” tools, to compare world religions….The worst projects promote a culture in which students are called upon to “sell” a work of literature or a snack (more or less side by side). Instead of delving into the language, they clip it and package it. Instead of studying history, they build their “financial literacy” by developing a strategy for selling snacks.

Joanne Jacob also weighs in with a lengthy recap of the ongoing debate;  Finally, a hat tip to Jay Greene, who provides comic relief with a 21CS spoof from The Onion:  An impossibly deadpan Fox News-style panel discussion on Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Kids for the Post-Apocalyptic Future?  “The games make it all seem deceptively simple,” one panelist opines.  “A kid’s not going to be able to kill a six-foot long irradiated beetle just by pushing a few buttons.  He’s going to have to get down there with an axe and hack and hack and hack…”

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=VTbYUd1jUc4">http://youtube.com/watch?v=VTbYUd1jUc4</a>

21st Century Skills: A Guide for Clear Thinkers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 2, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Theory and Teacher Training. 17 Comments

In politics, “issue framing” means presenting an issue in a way that is most likely to get others to agree.  A classic example of this is in the debate over abortion.  No one is for or against it; they support the “right to life” or the “right to choose.”  Reject a cleverly framed issue and you risk finding yourself on political, moral or ethical thin ice.  This is why those who are opposed to military actions must turn cartwheels to “support the troops.”  It’s essential that you praise the men and women in uniform if you wish to criticize what they are being ordered to do. 

21st Century skills is a masterpiece of issue framing.  Who can possibly argue against students being able to innovate, think critically and solve problems?  The beauty of a well-framed argument is that it keeps its opponent forever on defense.  A classic piece of political wisdom is ”if you’re explaining, you’re losing” and critics of 21st Century Skills have to spend a lot of time explaining why something that sounds so attractive and desirable doesn’t make a lot of sense, or simply won’t work. 

That brings us to the peerless Dan Willingham, who patiently and clearly unpacks several of the problems with the 21st Century skills movement.  Dan stole the show at last week’s Common Core panel discussion in Washington, and his piece today on Britannica Blog lays out in a single reading three flawed assumptions made by The Partnership for 21st Century Skills:

1. Knowledge and Skills are separate.
2. Teachers don’t have cognitive limits.
3. Experience is equivalent to practice.

Pay careful attention to point #2, for it’s enormously important, and with the exception of Willingham, it has gone completely undiscussed. As currently conceived, 21st century skills enthusiasts expect teachers to do a job that is literally beyond the cognitive abilities of almost all of us.  Not just beyond the limits of most teachers but beyond the limits of most human beings.

Everyone’s cognitive system has limits. We can’t remember everything that happens to us. We can’t pay attention to five things at the same time. This is important in the classroom because the methods that P21 encourages teachers to use (as the ones most likely to develop 21st-century skills) are incredibly demanding—so demanding that almost no one can use them effectively without a great deal of preparation and training. The demanding methods include project-based learning, small-group learning, and others in which students have some voice in the direction of the lesson plan. These methods are difficult because it’s so hard to plan for them; you can’t know what’s going to happen in the classroom until you get there.

Willingham points out that teachers already believe the teaching methods promoted by P21 are the best ones.  “Yet classroom observation studies show that very few teachers use them, almost certainly because they are so difficult to use.”  He went into even more detail on this point at his Common Core presentation. 

If you’re uncomfortable with the giddy promotion of 21st century skills, here’s the start of your “support the troops” position.  the 21st Century Skills movement is conscripting you in an unwinnable war.  They want you to do a job that is beyond your –  or anyone’s — cognitive capability.  It will be easy (and facile) to say as Ken Kay did at the Common Core event last week that just because something is hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.  Diane Ravitch recently pointed out that we’re already gullible about the myth of the miracle teacher.  Now P21 wants to up the ante. 

If we’re serious about closing the achievement gap and raising the level of performance of American education, we can’t be serious about asking teachers to walk on water and labeling them failures when they drown.  Any credible reform has to be reasonable and achievable.  21st Century Skills, as currently conceived, fails dismally on both fronts.   If we’re serious about equipping children with these important skills, we need to be equally serious and clear-eyed about what it will take, about what works and what doesn’t. 

Right now P21’s take on education is a clear case of Garbage In, Garbage Out.  And when it fails, as it inevitably must, guess who will be blamed?

21st Century Skills Fadbusters

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 25, 2009 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 21 Comments

Who you gonna call?

Diane Ravitch, E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham played FadBusters at a panel discussion on 21st Century Skills hosted by Common Core in Washington, DC on Tuesday afternoon, along with Ken Kay, who heads the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). 

For those who have only just arrived on our planet this morning, the highly visible and well-financed 21st Century Skills movement seeks to put information and communications skills, critical thinking and problem solving “at the center of US K-12 education.” Ravitch pointed out that the zippy name notwithstanding, most of the ideas promoted by P21 have been with us for over a century.  “After examining the materials associated with P21,” she quipped, “I concluded, to quote the noted philosopher Yogi Berra, that ‘it’s like déjà vu all over again.’”

There is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st century skills movement. The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the twentieth century. Their call for 20th century skills sounds identical to the current effort to promote 21st century skills. If there was one cause that animated the schools of education in the 20th century, it was the search for the ultimate breakthrough that would finally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content.

Bending over backwards to applaud its motives and goals, Hirsch nonetheless observed that the entire premise of 21st Century skills rests on a flawed assumption about critical thinking, problem solving and innovation:  “The error at the heart of P21 is the idea that skills are all-purpose muscles that, once developed, can be applied to new and unforeseen domains of experience,” he noted.  “This error is fundamental, and it is fatal,” he said. 

It will lead to the same disappointments as the idea that reading comprehension is a how-to skill that can be developed through strategy drills. On the contrary, reading comprehension, communication, critical thinking, and the rest are inherently constituted by specific knowledge. More than that, if you have domain knowledge yet lack mere technical proficiency, you will nonetheless perform more skillfully than a proficient person who lacks relevant knowledge. There are many experiments supporting this, going back to de Groot’s famous 1946 experiments with chess masters. Incautious claims about the transferability of 21st-century skills from one domain to another are very misleading. No, let me put it more strongly. The how-to concept is just plain wrong.

The fallback position of 21CS proponents has become something to the effect of “we’re not saying academic content doesn’t matter.  Kids need content AND skills.”  But Dan Willingham pointed out that it’s inaccurate even to conceive of skills and factual knowledge as separate.

I often hear people say ‘Yes, yes, of course, knowledge is important. After all, you need something to think about.’ But there is more to it than that. Knowledge is not just something that skills operate on-knowledge is what enables skills to operate in the first place.

“Everyone understands that memorizing facts without skills is not enriching,” Willingham noted. ”People forget that training skills without facts doesn’t work.” 

All credit and praise to Kay for taking on the challenge of defending 21st century skills in the face of such skepticism.  He nonetheless found himself backpedalling, continually reminding the audience that P21 believes content is important.  Ultimately, he conceded that the principal contribution of the 21st Century skills movement is ”offering a vision of a desired outcome.” Students need to be prepared to be more engaged civic participants and highly skilled workers. “It’s not our job to develop the model,” he said. 

Alas, there was little in Kay’s comments that suggests he gets the idea that his vision cannot be realized by the specific methods he is promoting.  Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine a Middle Ages version of Ken Kay, “offering a vision” of alchemy as the proper purpose of education.  “It’s not our job to develop the model,” he might have said.  “We’re merely articulating a vision that says the transmutation of lead into gold and discovering the elixir of life are vital 14th century skills.”

Good luck with that. 

A broad, solid knowledge-based curriculum is square one for developing “21st Century Skills.”  Inspired, creative teaching–not wish fulfillment codified by squishy, ill-defined standards–gets us the rest of the way.  That might not fit on a bumper sticker, but it might work.

Panel Discussion on “21st Century Skills”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 20, 2009 in Education News. 0 Comments

Lots of blogging lately about the 21st Century skills movement.  Now, E.D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, Dan Willingham and Ken Kay, the President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills will have at it at a panel discussion in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Feb. 24, titled “What is the Proper Role of Skills in the Curriculum? A critique of the idea of 21st century skills.”  Details on the program, which is hosted by Common Core and moderated by its co-chair, Antonia Cortese are here.  If you’d like to attend send an email to info@commoncore.org.

Linda Darling-Hammond Gives Props to Core Knowledge

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 20, 2009 in Core Knowledge School and Education News. 2 Comments

Tout le blogs, following Politics K-12’s lead, note that Linda Darling-Hammond will not be joining the Obama administration as many expected, but has instead opted to remain at Stanford.  Another interesting LDH note appeared in the form of a letter to the editor of this morning’s Boston Globe. Titled “Knowledge, skills are not mutually exclusive goals” Darling-Hammond responds to a recent op-ed by Kathleen Madigan of the Pioneer Institute:

We note that many of the Core Knowledge schools of E.D. Hirsch, whom Madigan cites in her attempt to polarize, develop solid knowledge and rigorous thinking skills through a project-based curriculum, defying the silly idea that we can’t develop both knowledge and skills in our schools.

I’m not sure where Professor Darling-Hammond (and DFER’s Joe Williams, who helped author it) got the idea that the Core Knowledge curriculum is “project-based” (it’s up to teachers to use their professional judgement to decide how to teach the material), but her observation that solid knowledge and rigorous thinking skills are not mutually exclusive is certainly welcome–as is her citing the accomplishments of Core Knowledge schools. 

Alas, several reports cite a seriously ill family member as a prime reason for Darling-Hammond staying in California.  We pray it proves to be not serious, and wish her well.

21st Century Sales Pitch

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 17, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 6 Comments

A study released today shows that using cell phones in math class improves test results. Well, it seems to show improvement.  Skeptics will note the study was financed by cellphone-maker Qualcomm. The New York Times reports it’s an opening salvo in an effort to position cellphones as educational tools.

Some critics already are denouncing the effort as a blatantly self-serving maneuver to break into the big educational market. But proponents of selling cellphones to schools counter that they are simply making the same kind of pitch that the computer industry has been profitably making to educators since the 1980s.

9th and 10th grade math students in four North Carolina schools in low-income neighborhoods were given “smartphones” meant to help them with their algebra studies. “The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problems and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch,” the Times reports.  “The study found that students with the phones performed 25 percent better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes.”

“Texting, ringing, vibrating,” the AFT’s Janet Bass tells the Times. “Cellphones so far haven’t been an educational tool. They’ve been a distraction.” She adds that it’s “almost laughable that the cellphone industry is pushing a study showing that cellphones will make kids smarter.”

The issue of business interests in education is thorny and tough to unwind.  The board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, for example, has representatives from Intel, HP, Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Cisco and other tech companies.  While they are wise to be concerned about the capabilities of their future employees, they may also stand to benefit from building their share of the education market.  The ability to weigh the interests of sources of information, and think critically about their value is, of course, a key 21st Century skill.

21st Century Skills and the Tree Octopus Problem

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 5, 2009 in No category. 27 Comments

The 21st century skills movement has a problem.  It’s a problem that can’t be solved by all of the innovation, creativity and information literacy lessons under the sun, yet it can be deftly handled by a little bit of science knowledge.  Call it the tree octopus problem.

The Partnership for 21st  Century Skills describes its mission as to serve as a catalyst to position 21st century skills at the center of US K-12 education.  Based on “hundreds of hours of research, development and feedback from educators and business leaders across the nation,” it has developed “skills maps” for educators to help teach the supposedly new skills of demonstrating originality and inventiveness in work and developing, implementing and communicating new ideas to others.  To its credit, the Partnership does not dismiss traditional curricular content, but rather ”advocates for the integration of 21st Century Skills into K-12 education so that students can advance their learning in core academic subjects.” 

So what does a 21st Century ELA lesson actually look like in the classroom?  Here’s an example of a 4th grade “information literacy” activity taken directly from the 21st Century Skills Map.

Outcome: Evaluate information critically and competently.

Example: Students are given a teacher-generated list of websites that are a mixture of legitimate and hoax sites.  Students apply a website evaluation framework such as RADCAB (www.radcab.com) to write an explanation for deciding whether each site is credible or not.

“RADCAB,” if you’re not familiar with it, is a trademarked “critical thinking assessment tool for online information” that teaches kids to evaluate the information on a website.  RADCAB is an acronym for Relevance, Appropriateness, Detail, Currency, Authority and Bias.  OK, RADCAB, say hello to my little friend, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, an endangered species and Internet cause célèbre.

RADCAB features a rubric that helps students evaluate online information.  Level 3 of 4 (the “Research Pro” level, and presumably a reasonable goal for all learners) includes things like “I create ’slam-dunk’ keywords from my research questions and use them to find relevant information” and “I leave information sources quickly that are too hard for me or offend my core values.”  Nothing very helpful in determining if the Tree Octopus is for real or not. The rubric also tells us we are research pros if we “look for copyright information or ‘last updated’ information” in the source.  Very well: The tree octopus site was created in 1998 and updated within the last two months, so it must be a current source of tree octopus information.  We are also research pros if we ”look for the authority behind the information on a website because I know if affects the accuracy of the information found there.”  Merely looking for the authority tells us nothing about its value, but let’s dig deeper.  The authority behind the site is the “Kelvinic University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society.” Sounds credible. It is, after all, a university, and one only has to go the extra mile to be a Level 4, or “Totally Rad Researcher.”  The Tree Octopus site even carries an endorsement from Greenpeas.org, and I’ve heard of them (haven’t I?) and links to the scientific-sounding ”Cephalopod News.” 

It’s possible to spend countless hours looking at the various RADCAB categories without getting the joke.  Unless, of course, you actually know something about cephalopods — such as the fact that they are marine invertebrates that would have a tough time surviving or even maintaining their shape out of the water — then the hoax is transparent. 

Here’s where we come smack up against the limits of information literacy skills in the absence of content knowledge.  Researchers at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education asked 25 seventh-graders from middle schools across the state to review the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site, the results were unsurprising:

  • All 25 students fell for the Internet hoax;
  • All but one of the 25 rated the site as “very credible;”
  • Most struggled when asked to produce proof – or even clues – that the web site was false, even after the UConn researchers told them it was; and
  • Some of the students still insisted vehemently that the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus really exists.

If you were on the research team you might fairly conclude that science knowledge was lacking in the 7th graders in the study.  (One dead giveaway on the site is the reference to the Tree Octopus’s natural predators, the bald eagle and the sasquatch.)  But the team at the University of Connecticut saw things differently.  Their verdict: “Classroom instruction in online reading and other ‘new literacies’ is ‘woefully lacking.’” 

(Cue the sounds of palms smacking on foreheads)

It’s one thing to talk about how 21st century skills can “advance learning in core academic subjects.” It’s quite another to put it into practice.  To a hammer, everything is a nail, and to 21st century skills enthusiasts, it’s all about technology tools, information literacy, innovation and collaboration. All the rest is ”facts you can find online in a maximum of 20 seconds.” So the question for the Partership for 21st Century Skills is this: are you prepared to argue just as strenuously for content standards and a broad, rich curriculum as for innovation, critical thinking and problem solving standards?  Because ultimately 21st Century skills without content knowledge is a non-starter and probably a step backward.  Dan Willingham proved to be not just a great cognitive scientist, but a good history student recently when he noted a familiar pattern in education:

Pendulum swings between an emphasis on process (analysis, critical thinking, cooperative learning) which fosters concern that students lack knowledge and generates a back-to-basics movement that emphasizes content, which fosters concern that student are merely parroting facts with no idea of how to use their knowledge, and so on.  In calmer moments, everyone agrees that students must have both content knowledge and practice in using it, but one or the other tends to get lost as the emphasis sweeps to the other extreme.

Wise words.  Maybe if we start listening, history will stop repeating itself.

21st Century Snake Oil

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 3, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Education News. 6 Comments

Yesterday, Alfie Kohn; today Tony Wagner.

Jay Greene goes after the education guru on his blog and in an op-ed in the Northwest Arkansas Morning News.  The Fayetteville Public School system has purchased 2,000 copies of Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap and is holding a series of public meetings, according to Greene, on how Wagner’s vision for 21st century skills ”might guide our schools.”  Be afraid, says Jay.  Be very afraid. 

It’s hard to get people to think critically about people who push a focus on critical thinking.  To be for critical thinking is like being for goodness and light.  The tricky part is in how you get there.  To the extent that Wagner has any concrete suggestions, he seems to be taking folks down the wrong path.  He wants less emphasis on content and less testing.  But he shows no evidence that higher levels of critical thinking can be found in places or at times when there was less content and less testing.  In fact, the little evidence he does provide would suggest the opposite.

Joanne Jacobs weighs in as well, pointing to a Sandra Stotsky op-ed on Tony Wagner, and noting succinctly: “I don’t see excess knowledge as a big problem for today’s students.”

Cultural Literacy Bonus:  Check out the illustration atop Jay’s blog post.  It’s Bugs Bunny dressed as a Wagnerian Valkyrie from the cartoon, What’s Opera, Doc?  Can you imagine a kid’s cartoon using Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the basis of a parody today?  It’s a bromide to suggest that entertainment has been dumbed-down over time, but it’s hard not to notice the difference in the vocabulary of Mary Poppins, for example, or the Rex Harrison version of Doctor Doolittle compared to contemporary kids’ fare.  Quantifying the change in cultural references and vocabulary level in children’s entertainment over the last 50 years or so would make for an interesting study, if it hasn’t already been done.

Don’t Go There

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 2, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Curriculum. 12 Comments

Someone who worked on Ohio Governor Ted Strickland’s 2009 budget proposal seems a little confused about the difference between Core Knowledge and “21st Century Skills.”

“We thought former Illinois Governor Blagojevich was the most confused state leader in the Midwest,” notes Common Core. “But this chart, which lumps the idea of core knowledge in with 21st century skills, clearly illustrates that the Ohio Governor and the folks who advise him on education are at best deeply confused themselves–about the content of education.  No one who knows a lick about curriculum would put these two ideas together.”  Hmmm.  Where would such a confusing idea come from?    

Case closed.

Another 21st Century Skills Skeptic

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 5, 2009 in No category. 1 Comment

Add the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews to the growing number of observers skeptical of ”21st century skills,” which he pronounces the latest doomed pedagogical fad.

It calls for students to learn to think and work creatively and collaboratively. There is nothing wrong with that. Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece. But I see little guidance for classroom teachers in 21st-century skills materials. How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?  

Mathews is especially tough on the rhetoric of 21st century skills enthusiasts who insist, as one advocacy group does, that every aspect of our education system must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st century skills they need to compete.  “This is the all-at-once syndrome,” Mathews observes, “a common failing of reform movements.” 

Like many fads, 21st century skills has legs because it sounds so reasonable, especially to non-educators.  Children should be able to solve problems, and think critically.  For teachers, the fad has the potential to send the message that such skills are content-neutral, or can be taught in the abstract, which is demonstrably false.  As has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere, you can’t uncouple higher order thinking from the deep subject-specific knowledge that makes it possible. 

“It takes hard work to teach this stuff, and even harder work, by poorly motivated adolescents, to learn it,” Mathews concludes.  “In our poorest neighborhoods, we still have some of our weakest teachers, either too inexperienced to handle methods like modeling instruction or too cynical to consider 21st-century skills anything more than another doomed fad. There might be a way to turn them around, but if there isn’t, instead of engaged and inspired students, we will have just one more big waste of time.”