Welcome to OK, We're Cool. Now What? How to Use 21 st Century Teaching and Learning Strategies to Deepen Learning. ~ Please remind us of your name, school, position ~ Please share one “cool tool” that caught your eye in Cool Tools 1

Today’s Objective: Taking a closer look beyond the gadget or Web application to how and why we would use it in our instruction. How can the tools support project-based and inquiry-driven approaches to learning and help students acquire the 21st Century skills identified by national education/business partnerships as vital to their future success.

Clarifying Learning Goals What are we trying to teach and why? Is what we are teaching now, aligned with what is needed for successful living in the 21 st century. What is the core curriculum? What is the best way to find out what children have learned?

Key Assumptions What are some key assumptions about how students need to learn that are stressed at your school? Finish this statement….Students learn best when…

Source: John Seely Brown

~ Through engaging student’s preconceptions (schema) (schema) ~ By using differentiated strategies that embrace multiple intelligences (convergent and divergent thinkers) and multiple intelligences (convergent and divergent thinkers) and ~ Helping students to know their own processing styles and take responsibility for their own learning through meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) ~ In environments that encourage risk taking and collaboration ~ From total immersion and engagement with content and facts—(Helping students learn through deep understanding) understanding) ~ In activities that allow for student choice How the 21 st Century Learner Learns Best…

Let’s Share From your teaching– what is the best example of a lesson (using technology or not) that was designed to honor individual learning styles or intelligences? Or where you really saw this idea of engaging preconceptions at work?

Are We Preparing Our Students to Adapt to New Situations? Adaptive experts combine: Efficiency & Innovation

Small Groups Let’s talk for a moment about why it is so tough for teachers to let go of what they are use to and try new things… Breakout Rooms: Person whose first name is closest to the letter A- Lead discussion on what teachers have invested that will be tough to let go of in terms of innovation. Someone volunteer to jot ideas on whiteboard.

Teaching is a Creative Act

Imagination is more important than knowledge for knowledge is limited where as imagination embraces the whole world. Albert Einstein

“When students conduct the type of research that the discovery approach facilitates, they are functioning almost the way adults function when engaged in scientific research. He suggests that this is a departure from traditional forms of learning, where a teacher would conduct the research, and the students would be presented with the results. Rather the students conduct the research and everyone learns together.” Former Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine

“Requiring students to learn socially actually forces students to draw on their "emotional intelligence." This is a set of skills that includes how one handles emotions, deals with frustration, or resolves conflict. Goleman suggests that working in teams enables students to practice and master these important lifelong skills.” Author and psychologist Daniel Goleman

“Being effective as a teacher means a lot more than knowing whether a student got the "right" or "wrong" answer. Teachers need a variety of skills to be effective, especially in the context of project-based work: for example, they need to be able to elicit a student's thinking about his or her work and they need to understand how a student's thinking indicates where he or she might be having conceptual difficulties.” Linda Darling-Hammond Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an educational approach that organizes curriculum and instruction around carefully crafted ill-structured problems. Project-based learning (PBL) is a systematic teaching method that engages students in learning knowledge and skills through an extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products and tasks. A picture is worth a 1000 words….

Inquiry-Based Learning In inquiry-based learning environments, students are engaged in activities that help them actively pose questions, investigate, solve problems, and draw conclusions about the world around them.