Critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and creativity in innovation, are coined the required skills for the 21st century student and citizen. In order to nurture, develop, and foster these skills, students need to be stimulated through modern pedagogical frameworks that focus on the acquisition of content knowledge and skill attainment.
What I value in the PME program, is the invitation to reflect and improve upon our learning. In Innovative Curriculum Planning (Fall 2019), I was introduced to several innovative frameworks. One of our assignments was to create a “mash-up” of frameworks which explained that often numerous frameworks are merged together in order to achieve the desired goals of the lesson or activity. I submitted my assignment at that time. For this blog post, I decided to reflect upon and add to the mash-up that I originally created in 2019, taking into consideration my learning since that course.
The following concept-map demonstrates how I envision innovation in teaching and learning in a secondary science and technology class.
My Mash-up Explained:
A student’s ability to self-regulate, I believe, plays a very crucial role in their ability to attain 21st century skills. As such, the fostering of self-regulation skills is an ongoing process in my class. I briefly meet with students either in passing, during station work, or at scheduled times during remediation to “check-in” and offer feedback. Since I have upwards of 140 students, my focus is usually on students who are struggling in a particular area. Self-regulatory skills are then needed to be successful in a hybrid model of learning. I am beginning to use the flipped learning model more often. Students are beginning to see the benefit of arriving to class with some basic background knowledge obtained from viewing my instructional videos. The purpose of this, is to ensure that I have more time in class to offer activities that will solidify their content knowledge and continually work on their 21st century skill attainment. As such, the activities that follow the flipped learning model vary, and can be drawn from the benefits of the following frameworks: critical thinking, place-based education, inquiry-based learning, maker education, and STEM (to name a few). These are the most prominent frameworks in my class.
I believed my original mash-up to be quite thorough however, it is only after the content of this course did I realize that I was not addressing the learning needs of all my students. The universal design for learning (UDL) framework seems to address this important aspect of my lessons and activities. At its core, UDL requires teachers to consider how they will engage all their students, how they will ensure that there are multiple ways in which the assignment or activity is represented, and what options are being provided to students to express and demonstrate their learning (Posey, 2019). This was a monumental shift in my thinking. Affording students the opportunity to represent their work within a certain degree of freedom will ultimately help many of my students who continue to struggle with what would be considered traditional work (filling in a sheet or providing a write-up of a laboratory activity).
Therefore, through the use of self-regulatory skills, students engage in meaningful activities that are varied, relevant, and inclusive, to solidify and apply content knowledge acquired after having engaged in online learning in a classroom designed for universal erudition. Through interactions with each other and their environment, students build upon their skills which then further improves their ability to self-regulate. Taking a step-back while carefully creating an environment that is highly conducive to learning and allowing students the opportunity to tackle problems and issues collaboratively, is a big step in nurturing 21st century learners.
References:
Case, R. (2010). Bringing Critical Thinking to the Main Stage. Education Canada, 45(2), 45 - 49.
Gini-Newman, G., Case, R., & Woytuck, W. (2015). Nurture self-regulated learners. In Creating thinking classrooms: Leading educational change for a 21st century world (pp. 175–193). Vancouver: The Critical Thinking Consortium.
Hamdan, N., McKnight, P., McKnight, K., & Arfstrom, K. K. (2013). Flipped Learning Model: A White Paper Based on Literature Review Titled a Review of Flipped Learning. Flipped Learning Network.
Martin, L. (2015). The Promise of the Maker Movement for Education. Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research 5 (1), 30–39.
Ontario Ministry of Education. (2013). Inquiry-based Learning. Capacity Building Series, (32), 1-8.
Posey, A. (2019, August 5). Understanding Universal Design for Learning. Understood.org; Understood. https://www.understood.org/en/school-learning/for-educators/universal-design-for-learning/understanding-universal-design-for-learning
What is Place-Based Education? | Promise of Place. (2019). Promiseofplace.org. https://promiseofplace.org/