21st Century Skills - What D&D class is public education?

Okay, you can say it after you finish reading my posting; I am a dork. The first thing that came to mind when I was browsing around on the 21st Century Skills website was that I wish life were a little more like Dungeons and Dragons. I wish that we could just assign a certain number of skills points to different areas in our lives and be automatically given the ability to use those skills. Now, real D&D buffs would tell you that that isn't how it works. There are elaborate stories of how you got those skills and time was spent by your character perfecting the action that those points allowed him/her/it to get. For people like me, I like the short version. I spent my skill points and got the skills without any real work. I think that many of our students are more like me.

When looking over the skills, the framework definitions, for the first time, I found myself a little surprised by how many there were. I found it interesting that technology skills were not listed as a category until the fifth page of the document. I was also a little surprised to see that many of the skills our students will need according to this document do not show up anywhere on the standardized test for my state. Of course, my state, Colorado, isn't listed as a 21st Century Learning partner.

So, what does that mean?

The simple answer is that I have questions.

I don't disagree with anything on their site (although to be honest I haven't read all of the fine print on every page), but I do wonder if some of the higher level decision makers in my state do. I know that Colorado is rewriting the standards that we have so that they are inclusive of this model, but I don't know what that means for me yet. I wonder about those support systems that are described, because I haven't seen them all be supported yet. I wonder how long it will take for people to stop looking at me like I am a dork when I talk about needing to change the way we do business. I wonder who is going to help me incorporate these teaching methods into my classroom.

The implications are huge for my students if I don't include these methods and thoughts into my classroom. Although no written record of this quote can be tied to Robert Kennedy, I believe his words are the perfect sentiment for this time in education, "If not us, who? If not now, when?" I will continue to beg forgiveness for teaching my students in ways that I think will prepare them. I will continue to beg forgiveness for preparing them for a life where they will be able to collaborate and think. I will beg forgiveness for preparing them for a life where they can use the new literacy skills as well as the old. I guess I will have to beg forgiveness for thinking that there is more to a student's life than a test score that measures their ability to answer standard questions rather than difficult ones.

I think that most of our students are like me, if I can get the skills without the effort then why should I put in that effort? If I could pass a state test and that's all I really had to do, then why would I want to think deeply and internalize the information I was presented? Oh wait, if I didn't even have to pass the state test in the first place because I wasn't penalized personally for it, what would make me want to come to school?

The answer for me, is that I would want to come to school if school was all the things they talk about on the 21st Century Skills website. So, regardless of what others might say right now, I will continue to engage in these behaviors in my classroom. I will roll the dice and try new ways of engaging my students in the process of learning. Who knows? I might even convince them that there is some value in using those skill points they have to prepare for their future.

On Professional Development

Today we had a professional development day. This was a day for teachers to come together to share information about what strategies they use in their classrooms. The presenters were teachers from my school who had volunteered (or been volunteered) because they had something that was really working with their students.

As teachers we need this time to teach and learn with our colleagues. We all have a tremendous amount of knowledge that could be shared if we only had the time.

As I was sitting in the first session of the day, which was run by our administration, I found myself getting frustrated though. Why is it that we feel we need to invent the wheel? We talked about RTI and the presenters were excited about their updated paper forms. Teachers have to fill out the forms with information about students. Then, someone has to take that same data and input it into a computer. Then we have to run reports, on paper, and have meetings where we are going to read the information. Why isn't this process electronic? with dropdowns? and maybe even the ability to file share and work collaboratively with other teachers across disciplines who share the same student?

That got me thinking about blogs and wikis. Much of the day was filled with information dissemination. The kind of information dissemination that could have been done through postings like this one. We could have read the information ahead of time. We would have been prepared to discuss and interact with the information. Then, we would have had enough time to learn about how to use our distance learning lab, the lab that we were told had over $100,000 worth of equipment, that is just sitting there because we don't know how to use it. Or we could have worked to develop activities that students could participate in. Or...

Then I started thinking about professional development in general. Why is it that teachers, who are skilled in the art of differentiation, can't seem to figure out how to differentiate our own professional development? Why did people who knew how to collaboratively write have to attend a session that included training they had already had, instead of extending the session on technology? How did all of the training we had today directly address our focus for the day, the achievement gap ? I don't know...because we ran out of time to talk about it.

That's okay though. I know that another day is coming for us to discuss this. We understand the importance of professional development to the growth of teachers and student achievement. That is why we have set aside time for those discussions. I also know that they are giving me time to formulate my questions and ideas so that I will be prepared for the next professional development day. In fact, I have until January to ponder the items we almost learned today.