Having watched the video 21st Century Learning Matters, it has made me think about what I have been doing as a classroom teacher at my most recent school. While I still have a lot of room for improvement, the video has helped me realize that my teaching has been going in the right direction.
I have been teaching the Primary Years Program (PYP) of the IB (International Baccalaureate) in grade 4, and the skills for 21CL (21st Century Learning) are a core part of the PYP. We have worked hard to focus on what we call transdisciplinary skills that fall into categories such as social skills, thinking skills, communication skills and so on. What I have especially learned to be more valuable is the fact that we focus on key concepts for a central idea or central theme. These concepts push the learner to extend his/her learning. Generally, the key concepts are things such as connection, responsibility, or perspective, which encompass higher level thinking skills than simply gaining knowledge and facts. All of this is embedded into the PYP, but it is a challenging process.
I feel that having had this experience as a classroom teacher gives me a strong edge into seeing how the teacher-librarian can contribute to this educational challenge. In the video, Randy De Hoff said, "We can't do it all the way we've been doing it." I wholeheartedly agree, but it still raises the question, "so how do we do it?"
I have been teaching the Primary Years Program (PYP) of the IB (International Baccalaureate) in grade 4, and the skills for 21CL (21st Century Learning) are a core part of the PYP. We have worked hard to focus on what we call transdisciplinary skills that fall into categories such as social skills, thinking skills, communication skills and so on. What I have especially learned to be more valuable is the fact that we focus on key concepts for a central idea or central theme. These concepts push the learner to extend his/her learning. Generally, the key concepts are things such as connection, responsibility, or perspective, which encompass higher level thinking skills than simply gaining knowledge and facts. All of this is embedded into the PYP, but it is a challenging process.
I feel that having had this experience as a classroom teacher gives me a strong edge into seeing how the teacher-librarian can contribute to this educational challenge. In the video, Randy De Hoff said, "We can't do it all the way we've been doing it." I wholeheartedly agree, but it still raises the question, "so how do we do it?"
