Teaching for TomorrowBuilding a Common 21st Century Language

West Virginia

Reading Conference

November 14, 2008

Charleston Civic Center

Presented by:Karen Davies, Title I School Improvement CoordinatorMelissa Godfrey,Title I Technology Coordinator

Teaching for TomorrowPresentation at a Glance

This is a brief overview of Ted McCain’s book, Teaching for Tomorrow,

Corwin Press , 2005.• Examples of 21st Century Learning

Essential Questions

Essential Question #1:

What is meant by a “highly educated useless person”?

1-5

Essential Question #1:What is meant by a “highly educated

useless person”?20th Century

Teaching and Learning

Tell students what they should know and do

Test students for retention of information (“information regurgitation testing”) in the short term

21st Century

Teaching and Learning

Structure problems to allow students to discover knowledge for themselves

Focus on long-term retention and life-skill learning

Very skilled in doing school related tasks . . .but . . . lacking the abilities necessary to solve problems independently in a real-world environment

Essential Questions

Essential Question #2: What do teachers need in order to be able to

address the gap between practical skills students need in the 21st century and those

actually taught in most schools?

Essentially, this is the point of the book “Teaching for Tomorrow” – making changes to the way teachers formulate instructional methods to cultivate independent, higher-level thinking in a way that captures student interest. 3

Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning

Modeled using Karen’s

career & personal examples

BE PATIENT – I AM MOVING OUT OF MY TEACHING COMFORT ZONE!

Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning

1) Resisting the temptation to “TELL”

Karen’s personal example: Original idea for this presentation

15 essential questions outlining the book on separate slides with

ANSWERS following each questionAccording to McCain, “telling takes the excitement of discovery out of learning” (p. 20).

Carl Rogers (1994) contends self-discovery learning is the only learning that significantly influences a person’s behavior.

Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning

2) Stop Teaching Decontextualized content

Karen’s personal example: High School Typing

In the late 70s only students with secretarial aspirations or THOSE WANTING TO TAKE A “FUN” CLASS were enrolled in

typing class Resulted in typing “examples” from a book rather than applying skills to real-

world activities

According to Sousa (2001), when the brain receives new information, it places the data in working or short-term memory. This memory last for only 18-24 hours before it is lost unless a connection is made between the new material and the content in a person’s long-term memory.

Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning

3) Stop Giving Students the Final Product of our Thinking

Karen’s personal example: Modeling handwriting for 4th graders

Graded handwriting assignments by correctly forming letters on each student’s paper – throughout the

school year!

According to McCain, “this type of teaching is ineffective because it shows students only the final product (not the learning process) of the hard work involved to master a concept “(p. 27).

Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning

4) Make a Fundamental Shift-

Problems First, Teaching SecondKaren’s personal example: Teaching concepts by oral reading and discussion of science material, providing “STUDY GUIDE” to prepare for test

Follows “exactly” the words of McCain, “the teacher has done all of the work of defining the problem and has laid it out on a piece of paper” (p. 29).

Quick Activity

Passage 1: pages 11-12

Passage 2: pages 31-32

1) Record the instructional methods utilized as you listen to passages.

2) Which method is more likely to encourage students to be problem-solvers? Why?

Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning

5) Progressively Withdraw from

Helping Students

Karen’s personal example: Mom’s surgery Application to the saying, “Give a

man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, you feed him for

a lifetime.”

According to McCain, “there is a strong parallel between preparing young people for adult life and teaching children to walk“(p. 39).

Hold tightly when students don’t have the skills or experiences for success. Loosen the grip gradually until they can “walk on their own” independently (p.39).

Consider the following . . .

Do we learn more from success or failure?

Do we learn more from success or failure?

Failure tells us that we are doing something that needs to be changed.

Failure presents our minds with a challenge and calls for our problem-solving abilities to spring into action.

Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning

6) We Must Reevaluate Evaluation

Karen’s personal example: Miller’s Analogy Test

When told I had to score a 50 – scored a 48, 45, 42, 37, 41

NEVER A 50 OR ABOVE! Over 15 years later . . .A $50 test suddenly

became a $250 test with NO SUCCESS!

According to McCain, “standardized tests generally test lower-level information recall – it is critical that we not place too much emphasis on how students perform on these tests because they are not a comprehensive measure of student learning “(p. 45).

“We must ask students to demonstrate their ability to apply what they have learned to real-world-tasks” (p. 47)

Returning to Essential Question #2Essential Question #2:

What do teachers need in order to be able to address the gap between practical skills students need in the 21st century and those actually taught

in most schools?

21st Century Learning Activity

Teaching 21st Century Videos from Teacher Tube• 3 Stepshttp://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d29b62a286909165517b&page=2&viewtype=&category

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• Vision of K12 Students Todayhttp://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d1296214afd7cc367045&page=2&viewtype=&category=

References McCain, T., ( 2005). Teaching for tomorrow. Corwin

Press. Thousand Oaks: CA. Rogers, C. (1994). Freedom to learn. Newark, NJ:

Prentice Hall. Sousa, D. (2001). How the brain learns. Thousand

Oaks: CA: Corwin. Wurman, R.S. (1989). Information anxiety. New

York: Bantam Books.