Category Archives: 21st Century Skills

21st Century Skills: Growing Your Own Food

21st Century Skills

I spend a lot of time on the computer. But Spring is in the process of springing and that means that the garden beckons. I can see it from every window where I work in my little bungalow. From the office, I can see the green house, the hoop house and the herb garden. From the front window where I sit with my laptop, I can see the front yard, which we dug up last year to make room for strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and other assorted vegetables including onions and garlic.

Growing our own food is one of the pleasures of our lives. We’ve been eating fresh lettuce from the green house for about a month now. It’s black seeded simpson, a leaf lettuce, that came up on its own, a by product of last year’s crop. Tonight, supper will include corn and tomatoes from the freezer combined with beans and butternut squash for chili.

Increasingly, growing our own food is also a way of showing our “green” side to the world. We want to eat locally, and our own background is about as local as we can get. We control the fertilizers and pesticides and always have enough to share with neighbors and friends. Of course, there is a debate over whether what I’m doing hurts third-world countries and really has much impact on global warming since transportation is a very small percentage of the emissions created by growing food, and I worry a bit, but I also know that I have never had a better tomato than one grown 100 feet from my house, picked fresh from the vine, dusted off on my t-shirt and consumed then and there, the taste of the sun and the soil still part of its flavor. I once read an argument about whether it was more environmentally friendly for the British to eat tomatoes grown in their country, not so tomato-friendly, or grown in Spain, very tomato friendly, and shipped to England. I think it came down on the side of the Spanish tomatoes. And, I had to laugh and admit to being a tomato snob: with the exception of those grape tomatoes that show up on restaurant salads, all our tomatoes, even the ones in the sauces we consume, come from our garden.

So, why is this a 21st century skill? Because growing something, whether it’s a cucumber in a pot on the porch or an acre of corn in the back field, gives you a connection to the earth that you don’t get in the produce aisle of the super market, a connection that is essential if we and future generations are to make good decisions about dealing with the environment. You learn about sun and soil and rain and nutrients in a way that is impossible from reading a textbook, doing a simulation or watching a television show. I’m all for putting the seeds in the paper cups so kids can watch the leaves emerge and grow. And, gardening includes lots of problem solving: Which vegetables don’t like being next to each other? Which ones can take some shade? Why are my tomatoes rotting on the ends and what can I do to fix it? What are the pros and cons of using hybrid versus heirloom seeds?

Schools are not really set up for gardening since they aren’t in session for most of the growing season. It’s ironic, since that schedule was set in place to accommodate farming families who needed their kids at home in the summer months to help with the family farm. Now, I suspect that few families need their kids to help with the chores. I would urge schools to join the community garden movement and make it part of their year round curriculum.

21st Century Skills: Data Manipulation

21st Century Skills, programming, technical skills, technology

These days, the world runs on data. In our class, we looked at how data drives geography, moving from creating a very simple graph of earthquakes in Excel to incorporating data into Google Maps and Google Earth. We saw how text data can be separated from its format in order to be read by an aggregator. I think learning how to manipulate data and create databases is an important 21st century skill.

Here’s an example from the real world, aka my own life: As part of the programming I’m doing, I use a lot of comma delimited files, which allow me to quickly populate tables or create merged documents. Formatting becomes important here in terms of learning to escape certain characters and making sure there are enough commas for blank fields, etc. etc. etc. I also had a “Microsoft moment” when we discovered that the reason the csv file couldn’t be read was because its first field was labeled ID and that causes an error message. Since most databases have an autoincrement field as the first field and that field is often called ID, this seemed a bit problematic. But we have discovered that Numbers, the Mac spreadsheet program, has no such problem so we can manipulate the data there.

21st Century Skills: Programming

21st Century Skills, technical skills, technology

If you know me or have read this blog at all, you probably know that I find the term “21st century skills” a little annoying especially since they include things like creativity and problem solving. As though we have some corner on the market of those things because we live in a time in which you can watch Philipinno prisoners do the Thriller dance on your iPhone.

But as I’ve worked at various projects lately, I have been thinking about what specific kinds of skills might be useful for students to learn and while they eventually lead to those more generic skills (like problem solving), they are very much situated in a 21st century context.

One skill that I think would be very useful for students to learn is some kind of programming: whether it’s game creation using Scratch or Flash or web-based data work using php/SQL, programming is a wonderful way to be introduced to a worthwhile skill that demands great problem-solving skills. I’ve been working with a variety of programming, lately mostly of the database variety, and I move from finding myself knee deep in frustration when the code breaks go head-in-the-clouds excited when something finally works the way I want it to.

I’ve learned that there are always several different ways to do the same thing and that semi-colons are very important pieces of punctuation. I’ve also learned that there are many very helpful people out there who are willing to offer advice and guidance but I have to know how to ask the right questions and provide the right kinds of information. Finally, I’ve learned that I should go to bed when things are working, because when they’re not, I dream about them and sometimes the answer arrives in those dreams but more often than not, I just have a restless night.

I’m going to introduce my students to some very basic programming by using Scratch. We don’t have a lot of time (the biggest problem with the courses I teach) but we can get our feet wet and maybe a few of them will pursue it or, even better, let their kids give it a try.

Serendipity

21st Century Skills, Education, leadership, technology, Video, , ,

Each year I am invited to spend a Saturday with the principalship class at William and Mary. We talk about the big picture issues related to technology in schools and spend time figuring our the role of the administrator in encouraging teachers to use technology as part of their instruction. The agenda is online if you’re interested.

I change the workshop every year based on new ideas. When I first started doing it some 7 or 8 years ago, we talked a lot about technology itself and I spent a good part of the day demonstrating emerging technologies like student response systems and Alphasmarts. Almost no one in those days knew anything about Inspiration and wikis were really just for geeks. But now, those technologies are well known and most schools are deploying all of them to some extent. So we turn our attention to the larger discussions about what kinds of skills students will need to move forward in our ever-changing world.

Many of you have heard my riff on all the 21st century skills…I like to pile them all together and call them leadership skills. And I also like to suggest that Benjamin Franklin had those kinds of skills within his own century (18th century skills, as it were). But those skills seem more pressing now, maybe because in Ben’s day they were reserved for only a few and now it seems like everyone needs them.

As part of the workshop, we do a dotting activity. After all, it’s not real professional development if you don’t put a dot on something. I use Tony Wagner’s Seven Survival Skills and give the participants four dots (green, red, yellow, and blue). They are told to evaluate their own classroom or school in light of how well they are integrating these skills. The green dot is the one they are doing the best. The red dot, the worst. The yellow dot is the one they would work on after solving the red dot. That leaves blue: I used to give it to them as a gift. But now, I ask them to put it on the skill that they aren’t sure can be taught. And that’s usually where the good discussion comes in.

The dots often play out very similarly: most educators feel as though they are doing a good job with communication skills as well as helping students access and analyze information. They are not doing so well with initiative and entrepreneurship. And, the one that gets the blue dots, the one we can’t teach? Creativity and imagination. We had a lively discussion this past Saturday about what teachers can do to pique student creativity or foster their imagination.

And as they talked, I thought about the video clip I had edited earlier that morning. It features John Rinn who runs The Rinn Lab for Research on Large Interngenic Non-coding RNAs, part of Harvard Medical School. He’s a young guy with lots of enthusiasm for his work who likes to snowboard on the side. He is definitely creative and has some good advice for teachers who are trying to foster such in their students. The clip was a perfect ending to our conversation and the fact that I had just uploaded it at 5 AM that morning made me giddy with serendipity.

I haven’t put the clip on YouTube yet but you can view it, as well as other related clips, at the STEM Education Alliance website.

It’s Really An Environmental Problem, Isn’t It?

21st Century Skills, Education, online learning, Paradigm Shifts, , ,

As I read Will Richardson’s response to Jay Mathews’ Washington Post articles related to 21st century skills, I had a lightbulb moment (compact flourescent, of course).  Here’s the quote that flipped the switch for me in terms of some of the cognitive dissonance I’ve been experiencing lately:

But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

Will isn’t talking about student skills or literacy; he is talking about school infrastructure, both the bricks and mortar and clocks infrastructure and the curricular infrastructure.  It’s not as sexy as thinking about kids, but it is becoming the 800-pound gorilla in the room.  We just can’t take advantage of the kind of social networking possibilities that Will envisions within the current environment.   It’s something that Tim Stahmer writes about a lot, how silly it is that for all our connectedness and new understandings about learning, we continue to believe that kids only learn from 8 to 3 in the fall, winter and spring months, they all learn at the same pace and generally in the same way, and everything that’s important to learn can be tested through a multiple-choice test.  It’s also something that Tim suggested recently is nigh upon impossible to change.

If there is a more challenging educational paradigm than the organization of school, I don’t know what it is.  The physical/temporal structure seems to be part of the fabric of America and thus restructuring the school schedule seems to be the most resistant of reforms. There are glimmers of changes on the horizon, mostly wrapped around distance learning which, not surprising to this sometimes cynic, are being implemented to save money rather than in the much loftier interest of helping students engage with the community through social media tools.  They seem to tend to be online versions of face-to-face classrooms, primarily interested in delivering content related to the state standards. So while the format makes it easier to access education, it does not allow for the kind of passion-based, networked learning that Will is really envisioning.

For that to occur, there is a more pressing issue to deal with. High stakes, standardized testing is fast becoming as entrenched as the school schedule in the infrastructure of our national educational system, and I’m convinced it is the biggest problem we face in making any significant changes to curriculum and pedagogy in the schools.  In my state, teaching is all about clearly defined state-provided content.  Certainly there are some process standards but there is defined “essential knowledge,” mostly factual that will form the core of the test so teachers feel responsible for making sure students see all of it before the test in May.  Everyone single teacher I’ve talked to recently has said something to the effect that they know they aren’t supposed to teach to the test, but they also know that someone is going to talk with them if their scores go down to any significant degree and they certainly have to clearly identify which standard they are addressing every single day.  They get very little personal learning time, and they definitely don’t get an experimental year to try out new things.

I can’t help wondering what would happen if we just took a hiatus from the tests.  One year in the life of a classroom teacher and her students without the bubble sheet looming on the horizon.  Teachers would still teach the same subject (we won’t get too radical here), but they wouldn’t have to worry about covering every detail and could allow individual student interest to drive the learning.  So, without that accountability, would teachers everywhere just kick off their shoes and show movies the whole year?  I really don’t think so.  Instead, I think that given the opportunity, they would rediscover their own passion for the content that would lead them to an openness to new technologies and pedagogies that would support student engagement.

Since this is an imaginary scenario, I’ll also add that all teachers would have ongoing  job embedded professional development, technical and pedagogical support and adequate access to technological resources including the web, in short, if we  treated them like professionals.  Will got it right when he described teachers as “suffocating in paper, policies and processes that prevent them from exploring the potential of online networked learning spaces.”

To conclude, here’s the original quote from Will:

But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

He doesn’t define educators, but I immediately thought of a subset of the citizenry engaged in educational pursuits.  I would suggest this call needs to be extended to the community as a whole.  Infrastructure issues, whether physical, temporal, or curricular, are often not controlled by educators.  Instead, they originated with policymakers and legislators who are influenced by the opinions of many people, not just educators, and often make decisions for budgetary or political, rather than instructional, reasons.

It may be that we are living in an age of incommensurate paradigms. You simply can’t implement the kind of education Will describes within the confines of the prevailing paradigm.  Tinkering won’t do it this time.  Blaming teachers won’t do it either.  This is more than just adding some stuff to the curriculum called 21st century skills but a chance to really think about what Neil Postman called the “end” of education.  Everybody seems to want to have a national dialog: here’s a good starting point for the one about education.