Slides for Why Change? in the 21st Century School Leaders Workshop

1. Teaching for the 21st
Century
Justin Reich
EdTechTeacher.org
Co-Director
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Fellow

3. Why Change?

5. Skills for 21st
Century Work
and Life:
The New Division of Labor
Richard J. Murnane
Harvard Graduate School of
Education

6. All Males
Less than High School
High School Graduate
4-year College Degree
Advanced Degree
$5.00
$10.00
$15.00
$20.00
$25.00
$30.00
$35.00
$40.00
1979
1982
1985
1988
1991
1994
1997
2000
2003
2006
Year
HourlyWage(2006$)
The data on w hich this graph is based w as provided by Jared Bernstein of the
Economic Policy Institute. The data come from the Current Population Survey.
The sample includes all w age and salary w orkers, age 18-64.
Men's real hourly wage by education, 1979-2006 (2006 $)

7. Computerizing Routine Tasks: Self-Service Check-In

8. Types of Tasks Computers Do Not Well
Tasks that cannot be described well as a
series of if-then-do steps because:
•The boundaries of the
problem are ill-defined
•Solving the problem
requires imagining novel
solutions
•We learn to define the
task and accomplish it
through social interactions

9. Economy-Wide Measures of Routine and Non-Economy-Wide Measures of Routine and Non-
Routine Task Input: 1969-1998 (1969=0)Routine Task Input: 1969-1998 (1969=0)
-10
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
1969 1980 1990 1998
PercentileChangein1969Distribution
Complex Communicat ion
Expert Thinking
Rout ine Manual
Rout ine Cognit ive

10. Changes in Task Mix Within Occupations: Example: Secretary
• 1970 description of a secretary’s job:
“Secretaries relieve their employers of routine duties so
they can work on more important matters. . . .”
• 2000 description of a secretary’s job:
“. . . Office automation and organizational restructuring
have led secretaries to assume a wide range of new
responsibilities once reserved for managerial and
professional staff. Many secretaries now provide
training and orientation to new staff, conduct research
on the Internet, and learn to operate new office
technologies.”
Source: U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Handbook

11. One of these things is not
like the other…

13. What was the date of battle of the Spanish
Armada?
Student 1: 1588.
Q. How do you know this?
It was one of the dates I memorized for the exam.
Q. Why is the event important?
I don’t know.
Student 2: It must have been around 1590.
Q. How do you know this?
I know the English began to settle in Virginia just after 1600, although I’m not
sure of the exact date. They wouldn't have dared start overseas explorations if
Spain still had control of the seas. It would have taken a little while to get
expeditions organized, so England must have gained naval supremacy
somewhere in the late 1500's.
Q. Why is the event important?
It marks a turning point in the relative importance of England and Spain as
European powers and colonizers of the New World.
This example is taken from Bransford, Brown and Cocking (eds.)

14. A Homework Question
• Examine the homework that teachers in your school
typically assign:
– Does the homework push students to develop expert
thinking skills (non-routine problem solving)
– What about communication skills?
– Or does the homework ask students to do the kind of rules-
based tasks that computers can be programmed to do?
• The answer may tell you a lot about the types of jobs
your school is preparing students to do.

30. Participation and
Engagement“I never realized what little regard my
students had for my opinion until I started
having them turn their work into one
another”
– 8th
grade science teacher

31. Teaching in the 21st
Century
• Challenge: The cognitive demands of the labor
market and civic sphere are higher than at any
time in U.S. history
– Expert Thinking
– Complex Communication
– New Media Literacy
• Opportunity: Networked technologies allow
students to rehearse these 21st
century skills in
the same online environments that define 21st
century economic and civic life (Bonus: students
find those environments engaging)

32. Why not change?

33. Why not change?
• For the past 40 years, our department has
done a great job preparing students. Why
should we risk all that we have gained by
changing our approach?

34. Either/Or
vs.
Both/And

35. Why not change?
• Technology changes so fast. If we try to
teach them any particular technology, it
will be obsolete within a few years.

37. Why not change?
• These kids know so much more about
technology than I do, and it never works
the way I expect it to. If I use more
technology, I’m going to lose control.

39. Why Change?
• I could really get in trouble if my students
did something bad with the Internet

40. OFSTED Report
• Ofsted inspectors visited 33 primary and secondary
schools, a special school and a pupil referral unit and
found e-safety was outstanding in five, good in 16,
satisfactory in 13 and inadequate in one.
• Blocking pupils' access to unsuitable websites does
not encourage them to take responsibility for their
safety online, Ofsted inspectors say.
• "Managed" online systems were more successful than
"locked" ones at safeguarding pupils' safety, they said.
• Where the provision for e-safety was outstanding,
the schools had managed rather than locked down
systems
Full Report

41. Why not change?
• As a teacher, I’m evaluated on the
percentage of my students who pass their
MCAS tests. I don’t see how integrating
technology helps me improve reading
comprehension or computational skills.

42. It’s the hardest work I ever undertaken in my
career. We’re trying to effect change in scale,
and we have to “play on two playing fields” at
once. We’re still being judged by the criteria
for “Adequate Yearly Progress” and state
accountability standards, while we are
holding ourselves to a much higher standard.
We have to succeed at both. It’s hard work,
but it’s the right work to be doing.
- Jim Merrill, Superintendent of Virginia Beach Public
Schools (in Wagner, Global Achievement Gap)