Help Define "21st Century Education"

One of the things that has drawn me to the par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tion of edu­ca­tors whom I fol­low on Twit­ter is that they have a pas­sion for help­ing stu­dents learn bet­ter. Over the last cou­ple of years, I have heard and par­tic­i­pated in a lot of con­ver­sa­tions about so-​​called “21^st cen­tury” learn­ing, edu­ca­tion, teach­ing, etc. There seem to be a lot of assump­tions about what this means.

We have the Partern­ship for 21^st Cen­tury Skills, of course, but this seems to be only one dimen­sion of what many talk about when they men­tion 21^st cen­tury education.

I’ve been hav­ing a hard time wrap­ping my head around it, so to get some help from my col­leagues and com­pile all of the var­i­ous thoughts and ideas about the con­cept into one place, I’ve put together a Google doc­u­ment called “Com­pare & Con­trast 20^th/​21^st Cen­tury Edu­ca­tion”. OK, not a spec­tac­u­lar title, I admit. But I thought that if we could gen­er­ate a list of how mod­ern edu­ca­tion can, should, or does dif­fer from the “old way” of doing things, maybe that would help me get a bet­ter han­dle on it. And if it helps some other peo­ple in the process, so much the better.

To take it to another level, Kim Printz (@paperwerksart on Twit­ter) asked me this tonight:

So I’ve added a sec­tion at the bot­tom of the doc­u­ment to share ideas about what to do with this list. Where should it go? How can we use it to impact schools and stu­dents? Come join both parts of the con­ver­sa­tion, and add your thoughts to the list. Then take the list and share it with some­one: a col­league, a par­ent, a prin­ci­pal. In the end, what mat­ters most is not how we define 21^st cen­tury edu­ca­tion, but how we apply it to help stu­dents learn.