Anita, Peter, Lee . . . three generations working, learning, and living in ways that reflect their times. So what are the societal forces that make Lee’s world so different from that of his father or his grandmother? And how are these changing forces reshaping our learning, work, and life in the 21st century?

As shown in Figure 2.1, four powerful forces are converging and leading us toward new ways of learning for life in the 21st century:

These four forces are simultaneously creating the need for new forms of learning in the 21st century and supplying the tools, environments, and guiding principles required to support 21st century learning practices.

In the three-generation historical sketch in the sidebar, it’s easy to see how these forces have been emerging to transform work and learning. From Anita to Peter to Lee, each generation was increasingly surrounded by more digital devices, each had to use more advanced technologies and more collaborative ways of working, and work became increasingly less routine and manual, and more abstract, knowledge-based, and design-oriented.

Today, in Lee’s time, recent cognitive and neuroscience research in how human beings actually learn and develop is beginning to reshape education and training in schools and at work around the world.

This chapter gives you a closer look at each of these converging forces and their impact on learning today and tomorrow.

Today’s knowledge work is done collaboratively in teams, with team members often spread across multiple locations, using a digital zoo of devices and services to coordinate their project work: cell phones, Voice over Internet Protocol communications, teleconferencing, Web conferencing, laptops, personal digital assistants, databases, spreadsheets, calendar and contact management software, e-mail, text messaging, Web sites, online collaboration spaces, social networking tools—the list goes on and on.

The need for knowledge workers to create and innovate new products and services that solve real problems and meet the needs of real customers is a major driving force for economic growth and work in the 21st century.

Shortages of well-trained workers, especially in the technical areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM subjects) are a growing concern among business leaders. This demand has led to a brisk global talent trade and to heated controversies over practices such as bringing in skilled foreign workers on special visas and outsourcing work to lower-wage countries such as India and China.

Many high-tech corporations are also making substantial investments in global programs to attract students to technical fields and to train and certify them in technical skills. Some multinational corporations are now investing in the professional development of teachers and the digital outfitting of schools around the globe, so that the pipeline for future knowledge workers will be full and flowing fast.

In short, pressure is increasing on education systems around the world to teach in ways that will produce the knowledge workers and innovators businesses need to be successful in the 21st century knowledge economy.

With the mushrooming capacity to process, store, and transmit the bits and bytes of information, we are rapidly gaining fingertip access to much of the world’s available information. For example, in July 2008 Google announced that it had reached a new milestone: one trillion Web pages indexed for use by its Internet search engine. Some predict that by 2010 the amount of new technical knowledge will double every seventy-two hours.⁴

With these waves of information and knowledge crashing all around them, how are today’s students going to manage and learn from this deluge?

In the past, memorizing the tidy set of known facts, rules, figures, and dates of any school subject was a challenging but necessary part of learning. Today, attempting to memorize the overflowing storerooms of facts and knowledge in any field is clearly impossible. But an immense number of facts can be “remembered” or accessed as needed with a quick Internet search.

Yet knowing a field’s core ideas, understanding its fundamental principles, and applying this knowledge to solve new problems and answer new questions are evergreen learning tasks that will never become outdated. These learning skills need to move to the heart of what our schools teach.

Thinking and knowledge tools are helping us learn, work, and be creative. But they entail a host of downsides: the beeps and fanfares of cell phones; the flood of e-mail, text messages, and “tweets” to answer (and spam and other advertising messages to plough through); the dozens of file formats and endless software updates to juggle; along with software crashes, privacy concerns, identity theft, and on and on. In addition, quantity of information is not the same as quality. Much of what is available to us is rumor, personal opinion, marketing copy disguised as Web content, or otherwise unreliable material.

Nonetheless, as technology continues to improve, the benefits our digital tools bring seem to far outweigh the drawbacks. The mental tasks of knowledge work—accessing, searching, analyzing, storing, managing, creating, and communicating information and knowledge—are becoming easier and more efficient as our digital tools for thinking, learning, communicating, collaborating, and working become more powerful, integrated, connected, and easier to use. These 21st century companions are helping more and more of us meet the demands of our times effectively and creatively.

In 1975, for example, the average home media environment included four “information products” (TV programming, news, advertising, and radio programming) delivered by only five routes (broadcast TV and radio, phone, mail, newspaper delivery). Display and listening devices were limited to TVs, radios, stereos, telephones, and paper. And storage options ranged from paper to vinyl records to tape, whether reel-to-reel, eight-track, or cassette.⁶

Today, each of these categories holds two to four times as many items. Consider the following innovations that have come into common use since 1975:

This list was no doubt incomplete as soon as it was written—the pace of new digital devices coming into the market (and leaving it) is overwhelming. And the variety of ways these devices can now interconnect in a home’s digital ecology is even more bewildering.

A moment’s reflection will reveal another difference between 1975 and today. Then, devices tended to have a single use, and you had few choices for how and where you could take in content (the audio, video, or print). Paper media—newspapers and magazines—were as versatile as you could get. Today, TV, music, online content, traditional print, and personal communications can all be delivered, watched, heard, or read on multiple portable devices.

No wonder net geners are different from their parents, having grown up “bathed in bits” since they were born.⁷ But there is more to it than their heightened abilities to multitask, search the Web, listen to music, update their blogs, create Web sites, make movies, play video games, and text friends on their cell phones. These young people are the first generation in history to know more about the most powerful tools for change in our society—digital information and communications technologies—than their elders: their parents and teachers. This is changing both family and school dynamics, as students switch roles and become digital mentors, and teachers and parents become part-time students of our young digital experts.

Net geners’ lifelong immersion in all things digital has given them a whole new set of desires and expectations. In a recent study of more than eleven thousand individuals aged eleven to thirty-one, eight common attitudes, behaviors, and expectations were found that clearly distinguish them from their parents.⁸ They want (and more than their predecessors of the 1960s, expect) the following:

These net gen expectations present new sets of demands on our education systems—demands that are coming from education’s clients and customers—the growing ranks of net generation students.

A one-size-fits-all factory model and one-way broadcast approach to learning does not work well for these students. New ways to make learning interactive, personalized, collaborative, creative, and innovative are needed to engage and keep net geners actively learning in schools everywhere.

As discussed in the following sections, five key findings from research in the science of learning can be used to direct and guide our efforts to reshape learning to meet our times:¹⁰

Transferring what is learned from one context to another (such as from the classroom to the real world) is often not successful. Doing supermarket math problems on a test is different from mentally calculating price differences of three kinds and sizes of laundry soap in an actual store. The setting in which a new skill or piece of knowledge is learned strongly influences whether or not that skill or knowledge can be applied elsewhere.

Simulating the real-world environment with media or by actually being in a place where that particular skill or knowledge is used in the world—supplying a more authentic context for learning—increases the chance that a lesson will be remembered and can be used in other similar situations.¹²

This finding suggests students need more real-world problem solving, internships or apprenticeships in real work settings, and other more authentic learning experiences to make learning last and be useful.

Recognizing what you already know from past experience—and what you currently believe from the latest versions of your mental models—are important first steps in the learning process. Unfortunately, in our haste to teach new material, the important step of helping learners reflect on their current mental models is often overlooked. ¹⁵

Building and manipulating external models, whether they’re physical ones (wood or LEGO blocks, robotic parts, and the like) or virtual ones (drawings on paper or screens, computer simulations like The Sims or Spore, virtual worlds like Second Life, video games, and so on) help us visualize and further develop our internal mental models.

Both visceral (hands-on) and virtual (on-screen) modeling activities provide ways to make thinking visible, reflecting the internal model making and learning going on inside our heads.¹⁶

How to personalize learning and how to differentiate instruction for diverse classrooms are two of the great educational challenges of the 21st century. The evidence is clear that personalized learning can have a positive effect on both learning performance and attitudes toward learning.²²

With recent developments in learning technology such as the Universal Design for Learning approach and tools, ²³ we can now begin to personalize learning to meet each student’s learning abilities and disabilities, learning styles and preferences, and unique profile of talents and competence.

Both face-to-face and virtual collaborations online have been shown to increase learning motivation, create better and more innovative results, and develop social and cross-cultural skills.²⁴ Learning in a community of learners who share knowledge, questions, skills, progress, and passion for a subject is exactly how adults learn when they participate in their communities of work and professional practice.²⁵

A wide variety of online communication tools and environments that support social, collaborative, and community approaches to learning are now available. Since the Internet is global, students can now be global learners, connecting and learning with others around the planet.

Despite these and other strong resistive pressures, the global convergence of forces for change toward a 21st century learning model are gradually winning out. More and more schools and communities are adopting 21st century learning approaches each year. We are accelerating toward a new balance for 21st century education.

Tay Lai Ling, the deputy director for Curriculum Policy and Pedagogy for the Singapore Ministry of Education, puts it this way:

Bob Pearlman, director of Strategic Planning for the New Tech Foundation, a fast-growing network of project learning high schools, echoes both the excitement and the challenge in making 21st century learning a reality:

What are these schools doing to shift their balance toward 21st century learning? What does this shifting balance look like? What does this mean for teachers and students in school classrooms each day?

Figure 2.2 lists ranges of teaching and learning practices. As education adapts learning methods to meet the demands of the 21st century, schools, districts, states, provinces, education departments, and ministries all over the world are shifting their practices toward a new balance, leaning more to the right of the range of each of these practices.

Take a moment to think about all the new 21st century demands on education. We face demands from the new global knowledge economy; from the converging forces of knowledge work, digital tools, and lifestyles; from modern learning research; and from the need for the skills most in demand in our times: problem-solving, being creative and innovative, communicating, collaborating, being flexible, and so on.

Then look at the learning balance chart in Figure 2.2 and ask yourself—can we really prepare our students with just the left side of the chart of learning practices alone? These have been the prevailing teaching and learning methods for quite some time. But will they really prepare our students for success in this new century?

It is important to understand that the learning practices indicated by the two terms in each pair are not yes-no, either-or educational choices. Each line represents a both-and spectrum—a continuum of learning practices blending both approaches. For instance, focusing on applied skills and learning processes doesn’t mean you abandon the teaching of basic skills or the learning of content knowledge and facts. The two must work hand in hand, in the right balance for each learner. Becoming competent in any subject area means developing both the knowledge and the skills to apply that knowledge to the kinds of questions and problems experts in that field would tackle.

Teachers who are shifting their practices to meet the needs of our times talk about how they’re remixing the coverage of content with the uncovering of ideas and concepts, and how they’re rebalancing their time between being the “sage on the stage,” who presents, explains, and answers questions and the “guide on the side,” who supports students’ research, discovery, and sharing of their own findings in learning projects.

As one teacher put it, “I had to unlearn the idea that teaching was about my content; I had to learn it was about their thinking and their skills.”

Digital technologies are increasingly supporting many of the learning approaches on both sides of the balance. They are boosting basic skills such as the recall of math principles and procedures, vocabulary development in language, and internalization of science terms and principles. Learning technologies are also freeing up time to focus on the 21st century skills that require more interaction among learners while providing tools to further their skill-building online—collaboration, communication, leadership, and social and cross-cultural skills.

Clearly it will take the best from the entire range of learning practices represented to successfully prepare our students for their future, with the approaches on the right side of the chart becoming more and more important as we move through our century. The educational balance is shifting, and a new teaching and learning balance is evolving in schools around the globe that better meets the demands of our times and the times to come. We explore these new practices further in Part Three of the book, the “how” of 21st century learning. But first, in Part Two, we look at the kinds of skills students will need to develop to succeed in the 21st century.

Learning for work and life in our times means helping as many children as possible learn to apply 21st century skills and a solid understanding of core subjects to the challenges of our times.

A 21st century education for every child is the first challenge—the one that will enable all our other challenges to be met.