1. Make It Relevant
To be effective, any curriculum must be relevant to students’lives. Transmission and rote memorization of factual knowledge can make any subject matter see irrelevant. Inresponse to that model, students memorize information for a test, quickly forget it after the test and then simply look up what they need to know on the Internet when they actually need it. This model undermines the possibility of developing students’ skills because lack of relevance leads to lack of motivation, which leads to decreased learning.
2. Teach Through the Disciplines
Science-of-learning experts concur that learning should take place through the disciplines, includingbut not limited tonative and foreign languages, hard and social sciences, mathematics, the arts, and music.Learning through disciplines entails learning not only the knowledge of the discipline but also theskills associated with the production of knowledge within the discipline. Through disciplinarycurriculum and instruction students should learn why the discipline is important, how expertscreate new knowledge, and how they communicate about it. Each of these steps maps closely tothe development of 21st century skills and knowledge.
3. Simultaneously Develop Lower–‐and Higher–‐Order Thinking Skills
In the previous section, students should learn through disciplinary study. Similarly, students can—and should—develop lower- and higher-order thinking skills simultaneously. For example, students might practice lower-order skills by plugging numbers into an equation, such as E = MC2, as a way to understand the relationship between mass and energy. To deepen understanding of that relationship, teachers might ask students probing questions that require higher-order thinking to answer.
4. Encourage Transfer of Learning
Students must apply the skills and knowledge they gain in one discipline to another. They mustalso apply what they learn in school to other areas of their lives. This applicationor transfercan be challenging for students (and for adults as well). Scientific attention to this challenge began in the early 1900s with the work of Thorndike and Woodworth and has led to a large literature and ongoing debate about transfer and the extent to which people can learn to do it. A common theme is that ordinary instruction does not prepare learners well to transfer what they learn, but explicit attention to the challenges of transfer can cultivate it.
5. Teach Students to Learn to Learn
There is a limit to the skills, attitudes, and dispositions that students can learn through theirformal schooling. Therefore, educating them for the 21stcentury requires teaching them how to learn on their own. To do so, students need to be aware of how they learn. Though the history of this concept is long, Flavellfirst coined the modern label metacognition in 1976 todescribe learning to learn and defined it as “one’s
knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes or anything related to them. . . . For example, I am engaging in metacognition if I notice that I am having more trouble learning A than B; if it strikes me that I should double check C before accepting it as fact.”
6. Address Misunderstandings Directly
Another well-documented science-of-learning theory is that learners have many
misunderstandingsabout how the world really works, and they hold onto these misconceptions until they have the opportunity to build alternative explanations based on experience. This process generally requires explicit guidance and takes time. For example, children believe that the world is flat until they learn otherwise, and even college students who have studied the solar system may still hold onto an incorrect explanation of why seasons change. Misconceptions develop from the process of creating explanations based on what we see and hear, and, although many of these explanations may be correct and serve as useful building blocks, others are incorrect and do not take into account complicated causal relationships.To overcome misconceptions, learners of any age need to actively construct new understandings.
Think of how many times you have thought you were absolutely certain of something, even if someone told you that the contrary was true. It is human nature to need to “find out for ourselves.” Textbooks rarely explicitly speak to misunderstandings, leaving the challenge of addressing them to the teacher.62 Thus, teachers face the important challenge of identifying misunderstandings and giving students opportunities to learn the facts for themselves.
7. Understand That Teamwork Is an Outcome and Promotes Learning
The ability to collaborate with others is an important 21stcentury skill. The science of learning tells us that it is not only a desirable outcome; it is also an important condition for optimal learning. Students learn better with peers. As Perkins
points out with his baseball analogy, people do not learn to play baseball by themselves—“only Superman could do it and it wouldn’t be much fun!” They should learn to play baseball from and with their peers and coach.
In typical transmission-model classrooms, students do not learn from and with their peers. The teacher and textbook transmit information, and the student engages in a one-to-one interchange with the teacher. Through this type of interaction, students lose the opportunity to learn from each other and to develop the skill of working with others. Working in pairs or groups is an ideal way for students to develop their metacognition and communication skills, to replace their misunderstandings with understandings and to practice low- and high-road transfer. The transmission model, therefore, not only robs students of the opportunity to develop the skills of listening to and learning from others and sharing theirthoughts, opinions, and knowledge constructively; it also detracts from opportunities to developother 21st century skills. There are many ways in which teachers can design instruction to promote learning with others. Students can discuss concepts in pairs or groups and share what they understand with the rest of the class.They can develop arguments and debate them. They can role-play. They can divide up materials about a given topic and then teach others about their piece. Together, students and the teacher can use a studio format in which several students work through a given issue, talking through their thinking process while the others comment`8. Exploit Technology to Support Learning
Technology offers the potential to provide students with new ways to develop their problemsolving, critical thinking, and communication skills; transfer them to different contexts; reflect on their thinking and that of their peers; practice addressing their misunderstandings; and collaboratewith peers—all on topics relevant to their lives and using engaging tools.
The Internet itself also provides a forum for students’ development of 21st century skills andknowledge. The nature of the Internet’s countless sources, many of which provide inconsistent information and contribute substantive source bias, provide students with the opportunity to learn to assess sources for their reliability and validity. It gives them an opportunity to practice filtering out information from unreliable sources and synthesizing information from legitimate ones.
Once they know where to look for legitimate information, students can use the Internet as a reference source in countless ways.
9. Foster Students’ Creativity
Creativity grows out of intrinsic motivation, which relevance fosters.82 If
students find lessons relevant to their lives, they are more intrinsically motivated to learn and use their newfound knowledge and understanding creatively. Therefore the science-of-learning lesson about the importance of making learning relevant to students also applies to developing students’creativity. When students frame their ability to learn in a positive light and view failures as learning experiences, they are more open to developing creatively.83 Therefore, the science-of learning lesson about developing students’ positive (incremental) mental models also applies to developing their creativity. Learning and practicing disciplinary skills, such as problem posing and solving, transfer, complex communication, and familiarity with a given knowledge base, can also develop creativity.For example, when students are asked to pose a scientific problem and design their own experiment to test it, they must use their understanding of the knowledge base and creativity to come up with an interesting problem and successful design. Therefore, the science-of-learning lesson about learning through the disciplines is yet another strategy that applies to students’ creativity development.
Teachers can also directly enhance students’ creativity by encouraging, identifying, and fostering it.Encouragement helps students to develop positive mental models about their ability to develop their creativity. Identifying creativity can help students to recognize their own creative capacities when they might not otherwise. And like metacognition, teaching directly about the creative process and what animates or suppresses it contributes to creative development.
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, Bataan
