The most critical area to invest in is high-quality professionaldevelopment. Such training can help teachers to develop their facility with the kinds of instructional techniques. The challenge is that not enough teachers currently have sufficient experience teaching 21st century skills to havedeveloped the deep expertise needed to train others. As a result, much of the professional development for 21st century teaching has been disappointing. The results have been characterized as ineffective in the U.S. setting.Effective professional development to train educators to teach 21st century skills should relyheavily on the same processes that identified as helping students learn. Teachers need time to develop, absorb, discuss, and practice new knowledge.Activities need to be sustained and intensive rather than brief and sporadic.Singapore’s requirement that every teacher engage in 100 hours of professional development every year is thus consistent with these findings.Besides time, another key element of effective professional development for 21st century teachingis appropriate materials and activities. Teachers learn most effectively when the trainingactivities involve actual teaching materials, when the activities are school based and integrated into daily teaching work of teachers, and when the pedagogy of professional development is active and requires teachers to learn in ways that reflect how they should teach pupils. Like students, teachers are less likely to change practice as a result of lower-order learning activities that occur via presentation and the memorizing of new knowledge. Professional development is also more effective if teachers from the same school, department, or grade level participatecollectively.
Thus, the type of teacher professional development that best promotes changes in teacher practices that result in 21stcentury learning activities are those that mirror the activities for : relevance of learning, opportunity to transfer learning to other contexts (including real-world contexts),metacognition and reflection on what has been learned, and teamwork or collaborative learning activities. A key challenge is overcoming the traditional learning formats, such as one-time workshops and conferences, serving primarily as “style shows,” that have dominated the profession and have resulted in little change to teaching andlearning over time.
Reference:
TEACHINGANDLEARNING 21ST CENTURYSKILLS: Lessons from the Learning Sciences
RAND Corporation,April2012
Anna RosefskySaavedraTony Jackson, Jessica Kehayes, Jennifer Li, David Perkins, Heather Singmaster, andVivien Stewart
By: EMMANDA C. CRUZ | Teacher II | Carbon Elementary School | Limay District | Limay, Bataan
