The notion of mass education must surely be to prepare our children for successful lives as adult citizens. As a mother, I want my children to live happy, making positive contributions to the world around them. As an educator, I want their schooling to have wellness, motivate to learn, prepare them for the challenges of the future and to help them develop the skills and behaviours that will see them flourish in the middle of 21st century. Perhaps we need redefine the purpose of schooling.
We should look to the future to define the educational experiences we manage for our children. We must also look to think more creatively about the way we package the learning, to make it exciting, relevant and dynamic.
Based on the literature in several research field, a framework developed how skills was improve on school, identified they must fulfil three criteria:
1. They should be measurable in large scale assessment
2. They should allow the derivation of behavioural indicator that (after some training) could be assessed by teachers in a classroom setting.
3. They must be teachable.
ATC21S™ International Research Coordinator, Esther Care (The University of Melbourne) has written an article, titled, ‘Assessing 21st century skills’, describes why the project has taken the approach to make 21st century skills explicit and provide teachers with data on their students’ ability to inform their teaching.
The ATC21s Project proposes collaborative problem solving (CPS) as an interesting teaching tool. CPS has been identified as a particulary promising task that draws upon various social and cognitive skills, and that can be analysed in classroom environments where skills are both measurable and teachable.
We define collaboration as the activity of working together towards a common goal. Collaborative problem solving means approaching a problem responsively by working together and exchanging ideas, therefore requires two very broad skill classes:
1. Social Skills
2. Cognitive Skills
To clarify this distinction we can said that the social skills are about managing participants (including oneself), whereas cognitive skills are about managing the task at hand and the reasoning skills employed.
Then, according to ACT21 project, social and cognitive skills can be taught and therefore the collaborative problem solving process can be measurable. In other post we will describe classes of indicators to do rubrics for measurable them and we will dig into these issues.
Bibliography: Gerber Richard (2010).Creating tomorrow’s schools today: education-our children-their futures. London: Bloomsbury.
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Note: we apologize for any errata there were.
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