Teaching for Tomorrow Building a Common 21 st Century Language

1. 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 Coordinator Melissa Godfrey, Title I Technology Coordinator

2. 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

3. Essential Questions Essential Question #1: What is meant by a “highly educated useless person”? 1-5

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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!

7. Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning • 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 question According 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.

8. 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 hoursbefore it is lost unless a connection is made between the new material and the content in a person’s long-term memory.

9. 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).

10. Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning 4) Make a Fundamental Shift- Problems First, Teaching Second • Karen’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).

11. 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?

12. What skills will Students need For the 21st Century? A Shift From Telling to… Discovery!

13. 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).

14. Consider the following . . . Do we learn more from success or failure?

15. 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.

16. Six Ways to Teach for Independent and Higher Learning • 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! 6) We Must Reevaluate Evaluation 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)

17. Returning to Essential Question #2 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?

18. 21st Century Learning Activity

19. Teaching 21st Century Videos from Teacher Tube • 3 Steps http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d29b62a286909165517b&page=2&viewtype=&category= • Vision of K12 Students Today http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d1296214afd7cc367045&page=2&viewtype=&category=

20. 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.