Mission and Vision need to guide your change to 21st Century Skills

Change in school systems is not always straightforward nor does it usually come easy; however, the fact that we need to embrace change as part of our professional responsibilities is evident for all of us.  For instance, due to State mandates, we will be adopting a new teachers observation and evaluation system that will use student performance as 50% of a teachers and administrators overall summative grade. Additionally, the summative assessments known as PARCC (The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) will be ready for states to administer during the 2014-15 school year. “PARCC is a 22-state consortium working together to develop next-generation K-12 assessments in English and math”. Moreover, alignment with the Common Core Curriculum Standards is coming to fruition as we speak. The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, and what we need to do as educators to maximize their potential and prepare them to be productive contributors in society. These are just a few of the new initiatives that we have or will have to integrate into our daily lives in the near future.

Ultimately, the Common Core is attempting to create the mind set that one cannot cover the entire academic content in a given discipline; however, the more you do this the more curriculum becomes a forced march through material. Teachers need to distinguish what foundational information is needed to be able to determine what must be taught. Our mind set must be that covering standards doesn’t mean just reciting answers to students instead of having students discover answers. Students retain more content when they discover and create learning for themselves!

As educational leaders, it is critical for us to measure all changes against our mission and vision for the community and the guiding principles that accompany them. If we focus on the mission and vision, it will reduce teacher stress and allow teachers to focus on teaching students to use their minds well. The intention is to ensure that both the mission and vision are forward thinking, and conducive to the guiding principles and non-negotiable values to help all of us move our school forward.

Furthermore, it is essential to implement 21^st century learning skills into the planning process, which help students master the multi-dimensional abilities required of them to be successful in college and career paths. What you know is far less important then what you can do with knowledge that you have.  Ultimately, being able to create and innovate new knowledge is a primary goal in teaching our students. This is one of the main reasons the district moved forward with our one to one iPad program. “The ability to create new knowledge to solve new problems is the single most important skill we need to teach and have our students’ master.” Tony Wagner 2012

With the the increase use of technology in the classroom, Common Core Curriculum, and PARCC assessments, the way we teach must drastically change from rote memorization of information to fascilitating a new teaching style of collaborative, hands-on, and challenge based learning through problem solving, asking questions and coming up with creative innovative uses for the content mastery. What does this mean? Rigorous inquiry based learning.

To help create an environment like the one described above, one technique, and it is not an all the time technique, is to invert teaching. Using videos or other media to explain concepts to students for homework allows class time to be used for collaborative, hands-on, and challenge based learning through problem solving, asking questions, and coming up with creative innovative uses for the content mastered. There are many more examples such as the techniques. For example, using such techniques as a fishbowl, jigsaw, think pair share, SQ3R, Challenged based learning or project based learning, differentiated instruction and planning through backwards design are effective instructional strategies used to increase student engagement and achievement.

Although it will be challenging, even disruptive to our normal practice and traditional teaching styles, we must look at giving students more of a voice in their learning. To help lessen our feelings of anxiety, it is necessary to have detailed lesson plans and maintain continuous reflections on how to make our practice better and improve our skills.

Lastly, teaching is about motivating students to take ownership of their own learning. Students today crave a sense of belonging, identity and connection to something bigger than themselves. Successful teachers make learning fun and meaningful for students, so they have the ability to take ownership over their own educational experiences.  We need to collectively demonstrate our passion and purpose for learning; this is why we are educators and love to teach!