Week 6: Fad or Key

These were very interesting articles. I love hearing both sides of an argument and then forming my own opinion. However, I feel it would be unwise to fully side with any argument seeing that I have no experience in the classroom. I dislike it when people argue an opinion that they have no experience in. It's like the people who watch a quick snippet on Fox News that was taken out of context and form a negative opinion on Barack Obama and/or the Democratic party just because Fox News said so. They fail to take a look at the whole argument or the big picture. They automatically take the first thing they hear as fact. To be clear, Fox News viewers and/or republicans are not the only people that do this.

If I must form an opinion, I would be in the middle and slightly against the 21st Century Skills movement. I feel that more needs to be taken into account in order to implement this way of teaching in the classroom, the teacher must be proficient in the technology, implementation, and assessment of such instruction. This will take time. Requiring prospective teachers (what this class is doing) to take courses in technology and other 21 Century Skills and the constant coaching of existing teachers on the methods must be done in order to fully update the classroom according to these skills.

I agree with Diane Ravitch. The world isn't all about technology, problem solving, critical thinking, group work, and communication. Although these skills and abilities are some of the highest sought after skills in the real world, they are useless without a sound base of knowledge to support it.

Jay Matthews used a great analogy talking about his final exam in college where he had to navigate a cruise ship by using the stars. He did this through, "strategizing, analyzing, collaborating." All the while, he had no clue what he was doing and still managed to get a good grade on the exam. Now maybe the teacher didn't grade too harshly. The point of the argument is, he was able to just "wing" his final exam without ever learning anything even though his teacher was using the 21st Century Skills in the final exam.

Stacy Khadaroo explains another point of view in that knowledge should be taught at the same time as the 21st Century skills. Many people seem to agree with this seeing that it is basically a middle ground/neutral stance. I, however, need to see more data proving these results not to be fad. This will take many years to see the results of this program. With anything, it can not be changed over night.