Be The Change You Want To See!

The push for teaching 21st Century Skills in our classrooms has reached a new level.  National education leaders are ready and willing to offer suggestions for teaching creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication in the classroom, but I don't think many teachers know what this actually looks like. 

Below are several teachers in my own school who are pushing to reclaim the vision of our schools by using project based assessments that foster 21st century skills despite an overwhelming focus on standardizing our curriculum, assessments, and student assignments.

·    While building chairs may seem a bit odd for an English teacher, one teacher at LHS has taken the first quarter to teach creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking by immersing his students in the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson by asking his students to build chairs.  Providing some initial resources, Sean Wheeler asked his students to build real chairs that are both functional and useful but also individual.  If students ran across problems in the process, they had to seek out help from other students in the class.  If they procrastinated, they had to own up to their work.  (Visit www.teachinghumans.blogspot.com for more information on the project)

·    Another English teacher in my school has just completed a six-week project based assessment called The Walk Across Lakewood Project.  In this project, students were asked to make connections to their summer reading book and walk across their city to re-discover the people, places, families, and faces that make our town wonderful.  After six weeks, the students were to create a project that displayed their experience to the class.  Projects ranging from full-size trees to quilts to amazing multi-media videos have been met with great excitement.

These two teachers are pushing their students to think differently despite the pressure to show growth on standardized tests and other standardized growth measures.  It is these teachers who understand that these attempts to standardize education may be a quick fix but will not sustain the school in the long run.