Parents and Teachers: A 21st Century Partnership
By: Elaine Hou, Instructional Guide
Imagine...
Imagine you learn how to dribble a basketball over and over again, up and down the court, day in and day out for years. You perfect this skill.
What now? Your coach tells you, “That’s it. It’s time to get off the court.”
Imagine you learn to play the scales up and down the piano every single moment of your life until your fingers are sore, and you can play them impeccably. You perfect this skill.
What now? Your piano teacher tells you, “That’s all there is to playing. Close your instrument.”
Imagine you paint strokes repeatedly on a canvas to fill a paint-by-number picture. You perfect this skill.
What now? Your art teacher tells you, “That’s it. Retire your paintbrush.”
Can we imagine such scenarios? To most of us, they seem strange and absurd. Yet let’s take a moment to think about the way schools traditionally teach our students. When we teach rote skills, (even when we teach them well), apart from the need to apply these skills toward something greater, what does this mean for our students’ futures?
Getting the Answers We Need Means Asking the Right Questions
As parents and educators, we often evaluate good teaching and learning by asking the tried and true questions: “Are we preparing our students for the real world”? This has been an important question for as long as we can remember the days of our own schooling.
However, a question that is not as often asked is: “What kind of world are we preparing our students for?” This questions calls us to look at the 21st century demands that students will have to meet when they enter into life beyond their school experiences. Understanding our changing world compels us to evaluate what we really want our children to learn and how we cultivate learning experiences for them within and outside of the classroom walls--in our quest to “prepare students for the world” that we are becoming.
What Kind of World Are We Becoming?
The digital age is fully upon us. It seems like we continue to outpace ourselves with the latest advancements in technology, until we are no longer sure if “epic” and “droid” are the names of our next cell phones or a new sequel to the Star Wars movies. With ever-evolving global technology, our world is connected in new ways with vast amounts of information at our fingertips. The job market in the 21st century world calls for an increased ability to evaluate vs. regurgitate, recognize new patterns, and create a whole new set of answers for problems never encountered before.
Our global world places a strong demand on our children to make sense of mass amounts of information. Our children will need to forge connections that stretch beyond conventional boundaries. Their futures beyond schooling will call them to navigate new and increasingly complex terrains of interacting. This global world calls for the type of learners and problem-solvers who use increasingly sophisticated levels of thinking to develop expertise, use that expertise to create new solutions, and communicate increasingly complex ideas to imagine the next possibilities. Just ask the young man who created Facebook what new solutions he will need to the complex problems and possibilities his work has created!
How does Two Rivers Fit Into this Global Story?
Our global world places a strong demand on our children to make sense of mass amounts of information. Our children will need to forge connections that stretch beyond conventional boundaries. Their futures beyond schooling will call them to navigate new and increasingly complex terrains of interacting. This global world calls for the type of learners and problem-solvers who use increasingly sophisticated levels of thinking to develop expertise, use that expertise to create new solutions, and communicate increasingly complex ideas to imagine the next possibilities. Just ask the young man who created Facebook what new solutions he will need to the complex problems and possibilities his work has created!
How does Two Rivers Fit Into this Global Story?
Our changing world demands nothing less than expert thinking and complex communication. These are the two critical 21st century skills that make up Two Rivers’ instructional focus this year as we venture into the next 10 years and beyond of our school’s mission and work.
As a teacher at Two Rivers for the past 6 years and new to my role as instructional guide this year, I grapple with what IS this expert thinking and complex communication that we want every student to possess. In these past 6 years in the life of our school, we’ve talked about it in part and have seen snapshots of it in classrooms. Yet we have not named it as a non-negotiable for every student until this year. This is a critical conversation that must involve our parents and teachers as a community of learners. We must all learn together what our world has become, and what students must become in order to be successful in navigating and transforming it.
Consider for a moment our school’s mission:
To nurture a diverse group of students to become life-long learners and active participants in their own education, to develop a sense of self and community, and to become responsible and compassionate members of society.
Consider for a moment what is NOT our mission:
To produce a group of students to become short-term replicators and passive recipients of an education provided solely by textbooks, to remain focused on a limited version of self, and to become isolated members of a fragmented society.
Of course, no parent or educator in the TR community or beyond would say they believe in the latter mission. But take a moment to consider: When we teach only to the standards and standardized tests, without an urgent imagination and commitment to problem-solving and innovative thinking, the second mission is the one we are actually committed to. This would be a disservice to our students.
So what does good teaching and learning look like, in service of our actual mission?
Now Imagine…
Consider for a moment our school’s mission:
To nurture a diverse group of students to become life-long learners and active participants in their own education, to develop a sense of self and community, and to become responsible and compassionate members of society.
Consider for a moment what is NOT our mission:
To produce a group of students to become short-term replicators and passive recipients of an education provided solely by textbooks, to remain focused on a limited version of self, and to become isolated members of a fragmented society.
Of course, no parent or educator in the TR community or beyond would say they believe in the latter mission. But take a moment to consider: When we teach only to the standards and standardized tests, without an urgent imagination and commitment to problem-solving and innovative thinking, the second mission is the one we are actually committed to. This would be a disservice to our students.
So what does good teaching and learning look like, in service of our actual mission?
Now Imagine…
Imagine you learn how to dribble a basket ball expertly, pass it effortlessly, and defend your opponent with fluidity. Now imagine you are given many opportunities to use these skills in concert to actually play the game. You know how and when to pull these basic skills together to actually solve the larger problem of playing and winning, learning the many life lessons that sports can teach you along the way.
Imagine your fingers gliding smoothly up and down the keys of a piano as you produce scales in every key. Now imagine your finger and wrist muscles becoming so strong that they can tackle playing the most challenging and novel musical pieces never played before. Imagine you can play around with the arrangement of notes that fit into a scale to create new patterns of melody and harmony. Now you know how and when to use your basic skills in scales to actually create vs. replicate music.
Imagine you practice painting countless strokes of different colors on a blank canvas. Now imagine you are given the opportunity to create your own masterpiece by combining stroke with color, detail with background, and design with imagination. Now you know how and when to pull these basic skills together to actually solve the larger problem of creating beauty.
It is a beautiful problem to be able to solve.
It is a beautiful problem to be able to solve.
The problems of the 21st century are not rigidly bad, nor are they easily fixable. They are indeed beautiful in their complexity, and require the ability of our children to apply their skills in service of creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It is not a question whether our students will encounter such problems in their life beyond schooling-our changing world says it must be so. For us as parents and educators, it is a question about how we design and facilitate learning experiences that prepare them for the 21st century challenges they will inevitably face. Committing to our students’ development of 21st century skills requires that we as a parent-educator community become expert thinkers and complex communicators ourselves. It is hard and exciting work to challenge our assumptions about education and strive for more than what is easily measurable. But in ten years, our students will thank us for the learning we have committed to today, as they access the most rich and varied options in their futures.
