Re-Tooling for the 21st Century

The other day I was analyzing a variety of nationwide results from standardized tests as part of our school's efforts to use data to drive our decision-making efforts vis-à-vis our school's improvement process. What I found was a perplexing nationwide downward trend over the last 10 years which seemed to cut across all genders, races, and ethnicity.

Given the advent of the world wide wide, the availability of information sources in an array of contextual formats, and the technology literacy levels of today's students, you would think that they would be fairing better than those students of 10 years ago, but instead we are seeing an overall decline in said standardized test results, somewhat counter intuitive.

Moreover, it seems that gains that we had made over the years are being reversed as we are seeing the widening of the gender, racial, and ethnicity gaps. We are even seeing the "white" students in decline. What is going on?

Not only are our students doing worse on standardized tests, their drop out rates are on the rise as well. According to a report was written by Paul E. Barton, one third of our students are leaving school without a diploma.

How do we stem the tide? How do we make a difference in these students lives who face a tenuous future to say the least, especially as we deal with these uncertain times and dismal economy.

Which brings me to something that I have been wrestling with lately as our School Improvement Committee attempts to address professional development for our teachers. What specific skills do we need to have as contemporary educators to ensure that we prepare our students for the 21st century? What teaching methodologies do we need to have to change the aforementioned trends in our standardized testing? Are these standardized results even relevant?

More importantly, how do we go about creating a culture of change within our educational institutes that enables our tried and true educators, who have been in the game for quite awhile, to align their teaching skills with the need to craft educational experiences that enable our students to be productive world citizens who can compete in a 21st century global economy?

Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about their desire, as the educators I know are awesome people who truly care about our students and the education that they provide. But what I am talking about is their ability to leverage the current technology to raise the educational bar to another level, setting the stage for significant reforms in our schools, our classrooms, and ultimately within ourselves.

Notwithstanding our desire to be at the cutting edge, wheeling and dealing like a true technocrat, we find that technology is extremely illusive, changing at such a phenomenal rate that it is even difficult for those of us who are somewhat technically suave to keep up with.

When taken together with our existing workloads, parent conferences, field trips, coaching, curriculum development, grading papers, creating evaluation rubrics, attending committee meetings, and all the other things we do as educators, where do we find the time to learn these 21st century technology skills to transform our classrooms into 21st learning centers for our students.

How do we equip those educators with 21st century tools, helping them to transform all those wonderful years of teaching experience into efficient teaching strategies that effectively prepare our student for the 21 century, especially when you consider their varied re-tooling needs and levels of readiness for change?

Needless to say, today's students are all together a different breed of learners, who have grown up using the web to do anything from playing computer games, to downloading podcast, to blogging, to texting, creating MySpace web pages, and the like. Information, videos, blogs, podcast, content of any kind is at the touch of their fingers.

Not only has the the web truly transformed our lives, but it also has changed the way we interpret the world around us, the way we learn, the way we obtain information sources, how we eventually find our place in this world, and even changing our educational delivery systems, methodologies, and curriculum content.

The future is here, but as more things change, it seems that the more somethings remain the same, especially our ability to adapt to said changes.

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Moreover, comments or opinions expressed on the Blog are those of their respective contributors only. The views expressed by the author or outside contributors do not represent the views of any educational institution, their respective management, or employees.

The intent of this blog is to provide a place where educators can kick off their shoes, relax, and express what is on their minds, hopefully stimulating a sincere and honest dialogue about issues that we all face as educators, nothing more nothing less.

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