INTRODUCTION
LEARNING TO INNOVATE, INNOVATING LEARNING
This is a book about hopeful change coming to education and learning. It’s also about rekindling the love of learning inside us all and the joy of working together to help create a better world—something we all could use right now.
Wherever we go in our education travels these days, we seem to be carrying on one long global conversation with variations on the same themes and questions:
• How has the world changed, and what does this mean for education?
• What does everyone need to learn now to be successful?
• How should we learn all this?
• How is 21st century learning different from learning in the 20th century and what does it really look like?
• How will 21st century learning evolve through the century?
• How will a 21st century learning approach help solve our global problems?
The premise of this book is that the world has changed so fundamentally in the last few decades that the roles of learning and education in day-to-day living have also changed forever.
Though many of the skills needed in centuries past, such as critical thinking and problem solving, are even more relevant today, how these skills are learned and practiced in everyday life in the 21st century is rapidly shifting. And there are some new skills to master, such as digital media literacy, that weren’t even imagined fifty years ago.
To help you get a better feel for the changes coming to education and learning, take a few minutes to join in on an informal thought experiment that many other educators, school leaders, and parents have been participating in. It’s an exercise that makes the issue of learning for our times very personal and very real.
The Four Question Exercise
First, imagine (if it’s not already the case) that you have a child, grandchild, a niece or nephew, or a child of friends whom you love and care about deeply, and this child is just starting preschool or kindergarten this year. Then consider the following questions, making notes as you go.
Question #1: What will the world be like twenty or so years from now when your child has left school and is out in the world? Think about what life was like twenty years ago and all the changes you have seen happen. Then imagine what will happen in the next twenty years.
Question #2: What skills will your child need to be successful in this world you have imagined twenty years from now?
Question #3: Now think about your own life and the times when you were really learning, so much and so deeply, that you would call these the “peak learning experiences” of your life. What were the conditions that made your high-performance learning experiences so powerful?
Before going on to Question #4, look over your answers to the first three questions and think about how most students currently spend their time each day in school. Then consider the final question:
Question #4: What would learning be like if it were designed around your answers to the first three questions?
We’ve done this exercise at the beginning of presentations with scores of diverse groups. The big surprise is that the answers to the four questions are amazingly consistent. No matter what their backgrounds are or where in the world they may be, audiences always end up with the same conclusion: it’s high time that learning becomes more in tune with the demands of our times and the needs of today’s students.
Question #1—What will the world be like twenty years from now?—evokes responses that project current events, issues, and challenges into the future. Samples of typical responses:
• A “smaller world,” more connected by technology and transport
• A mounting information and media tidal wave that needs taming
• Global economic swings that affect everyone’s jobs and incomes
• Strains on basic resources—water, food, and energy
• The acute need for global cooperation on environmental challenges
• Increasing concerns about privacy, security, and terrorism
• The economic necessity to innovate to be globally competitive
• More work in diverse teams spanning languages, cultures, geographies, and time zones
• The need for better ways to manage time, people, resources, and projects
Question #2—What skills will your child need in the future you painted?—inevitably generates most of the 21st century skills covered in this book, including values and behaviors such as curiosity, caring, confidence, and courage that often accompany the learning of these skills. The 21st century skills we cover in this book can be placed in three useful categories:
• Learning and innovation skills:
Critical thinking and problem solving
Communications and collaboration
Creativity and innovation
• Digital literacy skills:
Information literacy
Media literacy
Information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy
• Career and life skills:
Flexibility and adaptability
Initiative and self-direction
Social and cross-cultural interaction
Productivity and accountability
Leadership and responsibility
Question #3—What were the conditions that made your high-performance learning experiences so powerful?—generates collective answers that are even more intriguing. The stories we’ve heard over the years often bring out these themes:
• Very high levels of learning challenge, often coming from an internal personal passion
• Equally high levels of external caring and personal support—a demanding but loving teacher, a tough but caring coach, or an inspirational learning guide
• Full permission to fail—safely, and with encouragement to apply the hard lessons learned from failure to continuing the struggle with the challenge at hand
This last point is extremely important. Failures, well supported, can often be better teachers than easy successes (though this is certainly not a very popular approach in today’s “test success”-driven schools).
Question #4—What would school be like if it were designed around your answers to Questions #1 through #3?—consistently spotlights the distance between what we all know learning should be and what most schools end up doing each day:
• The world of work is increasingly made of teams working together to solve problems and create something new—why do students mostly work alone and compete with others for teacher approval?
• Technology is more a part of our children’s lives each day—why should they have to check their technology at the classroom door and compete for limited school computer time?
• The world is full of engaging, real-world challenges, problems, and questions—why spend so much time on disconnected questions at the end of a textbook chapter?
• Doing projects on something one cares about comes naturally to all learners—why are learning projects so scarce inside so many classrooms?
• Innovation and creativity are so important to the future success of our economy—why do schools spend so little time on developing creativity and innovation skills?
As a whole, the Four Question exercise is a quick way for a group to collectively sketch a blueprint of the future of learning. Now, if only we could wave a magic wand and instantly realize the consensus results of these Four Question exercises, schools would be far different places!
About This Book
The good news is that schools all around the world are moving closer to learning designs we know our students need for 21st century success. Schools from Singapore to Sydney, Helsinki to Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom to the United States are innovating learning as their students learn how to innovate. A vibrant global movement is in play to retune the instruments of education for a rising band of digital learners, and to sync up learning to the new rhythms of the 21st century.
This book is about why and how the global landscape for learning is reshaping itself, and about what this global transformation, often called the 21st century skills movement, may bring to a school near you.
Parents, teachers, school administrators, and policymakers require a clear vision of what our children now need to learn to be successful. Everyone who cares about education and our future needs a new road map to help guide our explorations and journeys to an approach to learning geared for our times.
We hope this book will be a handy guidebook and a comforting traveling companion on the road to learning in the 21st century.
A Map of the Book
In Part One, Chapter One begins with a look at the rather bumpy beginning the 21st century has brought us, and the new roles education and learning are now playing. We take a look back at the historical role education has played on society’s evolving stage, and then explore the world of work students will be graduating into and the prospects for future jobs and careers in the 21st century. Chapter Two examines the extraordinary forces converging on education, shifting learning to a new balance and altering both what we need to learn and how we will learn to be successful students, workers, and citizens of the 21st century. It also assesses the forces resisting change, and presents examples of the kinds of new learning most in tune with our times.
Part Two explains the nature of each of the key 21st century skills. Chapter Three introduces the framework that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has developed to guide the evolution of the education landscape, then covers the first area of 21st century skills, learning to learn and innovate. The next two chapters describe the other two main areas, digital literacy in Chapter Four and career and life skills in Chapter Five. Each chapter gives examples of how these skills are being learned in an innovative learning project called ThinkQuest.
Part Three turns to the practical side of 21st century learning. Chapter Six looks at the two most powerful motivations for learning that we know of (but often forget in our rush to “cover” content): engaging questions and problems. Chapter Seven then introduces a new framework for 21st century learning practice driven by questions and problems—the 21st century project learning “Bicycle model.” The role design might play in meeting the rising demand for creativity and innovation in the emerging Innovation Age is also investigated.
Chapter Eight discusses the research and evidence base that validates the learning value of this model and its powerful learning methods. That chapter also explores how each of the educational support systems of the P21 framework are working together to move learning toward a 21st century design. It concludes with a glimpse of a possible future learning framework—how our current models for 21st century learning will evolve from skills-based to expertise-based.
Chapter Nine, the Conclusion, offers a vision of how future societies may place learning more at the heart of culture and what a future learning network of schools and online services might mean for the global citizens of tomorrow. It closes with a focus on the urgent global challenges of our times and how learning can engage students and citizens around the world in collaborative 21st century design projects that contribute to creating a better world and to more meaningful and memorable learning.
Three Appendixes offer a useful list of 21st century learning resources, a brief history of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and its learning framework, and a handy formula for remembering the key 21st century skills.
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