to new learning tasks. Although this kind of assessment may be new to many parents and teachers, it is not just an academic theory. For example, Ted has seen how schools in British Columbia, Canada, have made a significant shift in the way they evaluate students by moving away from letter grades. In these systems, reports to parents reference the evaluation criteria and are much more anecdotal in nature.
Schools will also rely more on technology for instruction because technology provides the much-needed framework for students to access course content whenever they are ready for it. This means not only delivering content when students need it but also integrating those features with analytics that record, track, and analyze student progress. This frees teachers from much of the burden of simple information dissemination, allowing them to monitor student progress and focus instruction on creating the higher-level-thinking tasks that get students doing something useful with the knowledge they acquire. It also comes with the side benefit of making it easier for parents to see and participate in their child’s progress.
Such systems can help teachers identify which students are at the same point in a course and facilitate scheduling group activities. However, students in a continuous-progress learning environment take different amounts of time to reach a particular point in a curriculum, unlike students in a traditional school, where all students receive the same amount of time for learning course material. Consequently, when a language arts teacher schedules a seminar for a group discussion on the privacy and individual rights following a student reading of 1984 (Orwell, 1949), the group may consist of two seventeen-year-olds, five sixteen-year-olds, three fourteen-year-olds, and a precocious twelve-year-old.
This kind of change in the way educators focus school time has far-reaching implications for how schools operate. For example, once students begin to progress at their own pace, some will complete certain academic coursework before reaching the typical age for graduating into postsecondary study. School districts may establish partnerships with postsecondary institutions for students to continue their studies while they are still in high school. For students who complete certain courses in career-oriented programs, school districts may establish certified apprenticeship programs so students can begin some of their postsecondary work while they are still enrolled in high school (as many have done already).
Throughout the rest of this book, we write in more detail about achieving this kind of learning and how increased technology use and getting rid of classrooms facilitate this change.
Develop Higher-Level-Thinking Skills
From our work with many educators in North America and beyond, it is clear most educators say that high on their list of instructional goals is to develop students’ higher-level-thinking skills (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). However, the reality in most classrooms, especially in high school, is that there continues to be an emphasis on rote content memorization and regurgitation. This situation is understandable. Virtually all teachers experienced teaching with a low-level memorization focus when they were students themselves. It is completely natural for teachers to teach the way they were taught. In addition, the move toward learning standards and standardized testing produced a major focus on content and low-level procedure memorization to improve test scores (Harris, Smith, & Harris, 2011).
Consequently, many teachers feel their job is done when they convey the information in a course curriculum and then test to see how well their students can remember it. This focus on lower-level-thinking skills then becomes a ceiling for what teachers do instructionally, and they do not often go above it (Towler, 2014). Learning suffers as a result.
However, there has been a significant shift in the kinds of thinking skills people need to be successful in the 21st century world. What has become more important is what you do with the information you retrieve using technology to solve problems while working with others. Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, underscores this point when she writes, “In 1970, the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three R’s: reading, writing and arithmetic” (as cited in Davis, 2013).
In 2018, the Opportunity Network (n.d.) names communication skills, teamwork, and analytical and problem-solving skills as the top three skills in demand. Given this, teachers and students alike must see learning a topic’s details as providing the base for further analysis, conversation, and debate. Students must be able to rethink their assumptions in order to solve problems, form opinions, make arguments, create effective vehicles for communication, or innovate new ways of doing things. To effectively perform these tasks requires that students have higher-level information processing, problem-solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity skills. In other words, learning the specific details in a curriculum creates the floor on which high-level thought stands. We write about these skills in detail in the next chapter.
Essential Questions
As you reflect on this chapter, consider the following questions.
• How are the changes in the modern world currently reflected in your school?
• Knowing that the world is experiencing technologically driven exponential change, how can you adjust your thinking about what the future will bring?
• What steps can you take to stay current on what is happening in the world for which you are preparing your students?
• What are the implications of hyperinformation on what and how we teach students?
• Given that students are fundamentally different, how should you change how you deliver instruction?
• How can you modify instruction and learning spaces in your school to flexibly meet students’ individual needs?
• What implications do the principles this chapter outlines have for effective teaching and learning in the modern world?
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Chapter 3
NINE ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR THE MODERN WORLD
by Ted McCain
Today, even when they work exactly as designed, our high schools cannot teach our kids what they need to know.
—Bill Gates
The ease of access to any and all information (hyperinformation) that we wrote about in chapter 2 creates a major shift in the kinds of skills students need to succeed in the modern world. This shift points clearly to the need for students to develop higher-level-thinking skills (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Consider the task of finding information for personal, educational, or business research. In the past, such tasks involved the physical act of flipping through cards in a library’s card catalogue and then walking through stacks of books containing a limited selection of sources while using the Dewey decimal system to zero in on and locate the material you wanted to access. Modern digital tools make it easy to search a global collection of sources unimaginable in the 20th century. When the challenge is less about finding information than it is about extracting the most useful and valid information from a fire hose of sources, the essential skills students need to succeed in the wider world also change.
Consider what author and creative innovator Ken Robinson (2001) says on the topic of the new skills that people need for success in the modern world:
New
