TIRED OF SMART GOALS: TRY SOME DUMB ONES – 21ST CENTURY SKILLS

TODD STANLEY

GIFTED SERVICES COORDINATOR

PICKERINGTON LOCAL SCHOOLS

WWW.THEGIFTEDGUY.COM

THEGIFTEDGUY@YAHOO.COM

TWITTER: @THE_GIFTED_GUY

WHAT ARE SMART GOALS?

S – Specific M – Measurable A – Assignable R – Realistic T – Time-related

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

• Educators pick the easiest thing to measure which mostly includes multiple choice tests or problems with a single correct answer.

• We begin to focus heavily on the content and the memorization of that content

• We devalue anything that is not as easy to measure because it is too hard

• As a result we start to overlook the “soft skills” that are very visible but not easily measured

DUMB GOALS

D – Discipline/Professional Skills U – Used to M – Make one B – Balanced

WHAT ARE 21ST CENTURY SKILLS?

• In a Hanover Research report entitled A Crosswalk of 21st Century Skills, they analyzed six major educational frameworks designed to improve the development of 21st century skills.

• This included critical skills listed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Tony Wagner’s Seven Survival Skills from the book The Global Achievement Gap, the Metiri Group’s enGauge framework, the Iowa Core 21st Century Skills, developed by the Iowa Department of Education, the Connecticut State Department of Education, and the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) (Crosswalk, 2011).

FOUR CRITICAL AREAS FOR DEVELOPMENT WERE:

•Collaboration and teamwork

•Creativity and imagination

•Critical thinking

•Problem solving

COLLABORATION AND TEAMWORK

•Needs to be deliberately taught

•What is the appropriate way to act in a group, norms?

•Do you have specific roles for each member of the group?

•Group should be able to produce something that is better than if the students had just worked by themselves

CREATIVITY AND IMAGINATION • The more comfortable students get with thinking critically, or

outside-of-the-box thinking, the more creative their ideas are going to be.

• Creating a space to fail

• The more choice you give students, the more opportunities there will be to be creative in their demonstration of what they learned.

• This could be choices in topics, products, and/or depth of learning.

CRITICAL THINKING

• Use the levels of Bloom’s to guide you

• Higher Level

• Thinking

• Lower Level

• Thinking

• (Building Blocks)

PROBLEM SOLVING • Usually used in math where there is typically only a single correct answer. In

order to develop a creative problem solver, we need to come up with problem solving situations where there are numerous possibilities.

• An important aspect of problem solving is the time spent reflecting. We often say to students a mistake is not a mistake if you learned from it, but this is something that needs to be taught.

• How does one learn from a mistake? That is part of the problem solving process. Why did something not work? What could have been done differently to have gotten a better result? What did you see others doing that might have produced more success for you?

• Students need to be provided a structure and space for purposeful reflection.

IDENTIFIED A SECOND TIER OF IMPORTANT SKILLS WHICH WERE PRESENT AMONGST ALL OF THE FRAMEWORKS

•Flexibility and adaptability

•Global and cultural awareness

•Information literacy

•Leadership

FLEXIBILITY AND ADAPTATION • This is a valuable skill in the 21st century because we are developing

technology at breakneck speed. It does not take more than a year or two to develop the newest technology that makes the old one obsolete. Those who are able to adapt to these changes often find much success. Those who are not able to keep up might find their skill-set diminish.

• The skills involved in flexibility and adaptability can be learned by working on progressively more complex projects that challenge student teams to change course when things aren’t working well, adapt to new developments in the project, and incorporate new team members on both current and new projects (Trilling, 77).

GLOBAL AND CULTURAL AWARENESS

• It is important for students to have this global awareness because since 1965, the number of foreign-born people living in the United States has quadrupled to 43 million according to the Center for American Progress.

• Of course this can be a challenge at times when you are teaching teenagers who only see the circumference of five feet in front of them.

• You can expose students to global perspectives through the use of foreign-born speakers, arranging these speakers through the local college universities, parents or friends of students in the school, ethnic societies, or other contacts you might have. These speakers can come in or Skype and give a perspective from someone who comes from a different culture. This point of view can help students to understand this global awareness and that other people might see things completely different than they do.

INFORMATION LITERACY • Trilling and Fadel (2009) defined information literacy as the ability to:

• access information efficiently and effectively,

• evaluate information critically and competently, and

• use information accurately and creatively (p. 65).

• Many times, teachers assume students have already been taught information literacy, especially when working with older students. The problem, however, is that some students have not been shown how to access and analyze information properly or they have developed bad habits.

• Information literacy is a skill that must be taught purposefully. Introducing or reviewing the basics could be helpful to students at any level. Ensuring students have an understanding of how to properly research, utilizing both print and electronic resources, is not something you should take for granted.

LEADERSHIP • Some believe that leaders are born, that from birth these individuals have a

certain innate ability to be a good leader. Others believe that leadership can be taught, but what does that look like?

• Like most things, there is a little bit of truth to both of these. These are people who seem to exude leadership. But leadership can be nurtured as well. Someone who does not possess the aforementioned skills can learn strategies to leading.

• A lot of this can be done by having students collaborate with one another in groups. In having students work in groups, they learn the skills of flexibility, communication, patience, humility, and being responsible.

THEY WERE FOUR OTHER SKILLS THAT DID NOT APPEAR IN ALL OF THE FRAMEWORKS BUT WERE IN A MAJORITY

•Oral and written communication skills

•Social responsibility and citizenship

•Technology literacy

•Initiative

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO TEACH THESE SKILLS?

• Collaboration and Teamwork: 82%

• Creativity and Imagination: 29%

• Critical Thinking: 82%

• Problem Solving: 82%

• Accessing and Analyzing Information: 60%

• Flexibility and Adaptation: 61%

• Global and Cultural Awareness: 4%

• Information Literacy: 68%

• Leadership: 73%

• Oral and written communication: 80%

• Social responsibility and citizenship: 27%

• Technology literacy: 60%

• Initiative: 68% (Key, 2017)

HOW DOES ONE INCORPORATE THESE SKILLS A CONTENT HEAVY CURRICULUM?

•Authentic Learning Experiences

•Inquiry Learning

•Problem-Based Learning

•Case-Based Learning

•Project-Based Learning

Inquiry Learning

Project-Based Learning Problem-Based Learning Case-Based Learning

Collaborative Learning

CHARACTERISTICS OF INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING

WHY IBL IS MORE EFFECTIVE THAN TRADITIONAL TEACHING

• Promotes a deeper understanding of the content

• Helps to make learning rewarding: they are part of the learning process

• Builds initiative and self-direction

• Offers differentiated instruction

• No ceiling to the learning (Guido, 2017).

WHY PRBL IS MORE EFFECTIVE THAN TRADITIONAL TEACHING

• Develop your diagnostic reasoning and analytical problem-solving skills

• Determine what knowledge you need to acquire to understand the problem and others like it

• Discover the best resources for acquiring that information

• Carry out your own personalized study using a wide range of resources

• Apply the information you have learned back to the problem

• Integrate this newly acquired knowledge with your existing understanding (Cordovilla)

WHY PBL IS MORE EFFECTIVE THAN THE TRADITIONAL FORM OF TEACHING

• More effective than traditional instruction in increasing academic achievement on annual state-administered assessment tests

• More effective than traditional instruction for teaching mathematics, economics, science, social science, clinical medical skills, and for careers in the allied health occupations and teaching

• More effective than traditional instruction for long-term retention, skill development and satisfaction of students and teachers

• More effective than traditional instruction for preparing students to integrate and explain concepts (Buck, 2011)

WHY MORE EFFECTIVE THAN TRADITIONAL TEACHING?

• Acquiring substantive knowledge and develop analytic, collaborative, and communication skills.

• Development and improvement of problem solving skills and critical thinking

• Working and actively learning and collaborating in groups

• Improve their ability to publically speak

• Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is developed, allowing individualized learning.

• Encourages self-evaluation and critical reflection (Merseth, 1991)

HOW DOES ONE MEASURE DUMB GOALS

• Through teacher observations

• Through third party observations

• Through conversations

• Through interactions

• Through authentic experiences

• Through well-written, objective rubrics

TAKEAWAYS

• Soft skills are often more valuable in the real world than the content standards we base SMART Goals on

• We need to balance students between academic knowledge and being able to develop 21st century skills

• DUMB Goals can be measured objectively if you have the proper tools

• DUMB Goals require educators to think more outside of the box, a skill we expect our students to do

THEGIFTEDGUY@YAHOO.COM TWITTER: @THE_GIFTED_GUY