The case for 21st-century learning

Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education Directorate

Anyone wondering why knowledge and skills are important to the future of our economies should consider two facts.

First, jobs: employment rates are higher among people with more education than among those with less. This has continued to be the case during the crisis. Also, in those OECD countries where college education has expanded most over recent decades, learning differentials for college graduates have continued to rise compared with school leavers, for instance. Their pay did not decrease, unlike that of low-skilled workers. So from a jobs perspective, it pays to study.

This is a good, concrete argument for skilling up. But the case for 21st century learning goes deeper than this and is more abstract. It is about how knowledge is generated and applied, about shifts in ways of doing business, of managing the workplace or linking producers and consumers, and becoming quite a different student from the kind that dominated the 20th century. What we learn, the way we learn it, and how we are taught is changing. This has implications for schools and higher level education, as well as for lifelong learning.

For most of the last century, the widespread belief among policymakers was that you had to get the basics right in education before you could turn to broader skills. It's as though schools needed to be boring and dominated by rote learning before deeper, more invigorating learning could flourish.

Those that hold on to this view should not be surprised if students lose interest or drop out of schools because they cannot relate what is going on in school to their real lives.

If you were running a supermarket instead of a school and saw that 30 out of 100 customers each day left your shop without buying anything, you would think about changing your inventory. But that does not happen easily in schools because of deeply rooted, even if scientifically unsupported, beliefs that learning can only occur in a particular way.

In 2010, the world is now more indifferent to tradition and past reputations of educational establishments. It is unforgiving to frailty and ignorant of custom or practice.

We live in a fast-changing world, and producing more of the same knowledge and skills will not suffice to address the challenges of the future. A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would last their students a lifetime. Today, because of rapid economic and social change, schools have to prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, technologies that have not yet been invented and problems that we don't yet know will arise.

Think back 50 years: could educators then have predicted how the Internet, which emerged globally in 1994, or the mobile phone, which appeared a few years later, would change the world? These technologies have not just become tools of learning, but networking and knowledge sharing, as well as innovation and entrepreneurship.

How do we foster motivated, dedicated learners and prepare them to overcome the unforeseen challenges of tomorrow? The dilemma for educators is that routine cognitive skills, the skills that are easiest to teach and easiest to test, are also the skills that are easiest to digitize, automate or outsource. There is no question that state-of-the-art skills in particular disciplines will always remain important. However, educational success is no longer about reproducing content knowledge, but about extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge to novel situations.

Education today is much more about ways of thinking which involve creative and critical approaches to problem-solving and decision-making. It is also about ways of working, including communication and collaboration, as well as the tools they require, such as the capacity to recognise and exploit the potential of new technologies, or indeed, to avert their risks. And last but not least, education is about the capacity to live in a multi-faceted world as an active and engaged citizen. These citizens influence what they want to learn and how they want to learn it, and it is this that shapes the role of educators.

Conventionally, our approach to problems was to break them down into manageable bits and pieces, confined to narrow disciplines, and then to teach students the techniques to solve them. Today, however, knowledge advances by synthesizing these disparate bits. It demands open-mindedness, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated and becoming familiar with knowledge in other fields. The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded in 2010, for instance, to two UK scientists for their discovery of graphene, a new material with groundbreaking properties and potential applications. Known for their playful approach to physics, the two researchers' breakthrough came from a 2004 experiment involving a block of carbon and some scotch tape.

If we spend our whole lives in the silo of a single discipline, we cannot develop the imaginative skills to connect the dots or to anticipate where the next invention, and probable source of economic value, will come from. Yet most countries, with the possible exception of the Nordic countries, provide few incentives for students to learn and teachers to teach across disciplines.

Traditionally, you could tell students to look into an encyclopaedia when they needed information, and you could tell them that they could generally rely on what they found to be true. But today, literacy is about managing non-linear information structures. Consider the Internet. The more content knowledge we can search and access on the web, the more important the capacity to make sense out of this content becomes. This involves interpreting the frequently conflicting pieces of information that pop up on the web and assessing their value, a skill rendered essential by the appearance of the Internet.

Rather than just learning to read, 21st century literacy is about reading to learn and developing the capacity and motivation to identify, understand, interpret, create and communicate knowledge. Only a few countries promote such a broad concept of literacy in their instructional practices and assessments, but more will surely follow.

Another changing tradition is for students to learn on their own and be tested at the end of the school year on what they have learned. The more interdependent the world becomes, the more collaborators and orchestrators must step in. Innovation in particular is the outcome of how we mobilise, share and link knowledge.

The knowledge world is no longer divided between specialists and generalists. A new group-let's call them “versatilists”-has emerged. They apply depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships and assuming new roles. They are capable not only of constantly adapting, but also constantly learning and growing in a fast-changing world. In a flat world, our knowledge becomes a commodity available to everyone else. As columnist and author Thomas Friedman puts it, because technology has enabled us to act on our imaginations in ways that we could never before, the most important competition is no longer between countries or companies but between ourselves and our imagination.

Value is less and less created vertically through command and control-as in the classic “teacher instructs student” relationship-but horizontally, by whom you connect and work with, whether online or in person. In other words, we are seeing a shift from a world of stocks, where knowledge is stored up but not exploited, and so depreciates rapidly, to a world of flows, where knowledge is energised and enriched by the power of communication and constant collaboration. This will become the norm. Barriers will continue to fall as skilled people appreciate, and build on, different values, beliefs and cultures.

Success will go to those individuals and countries that are swift to adapt, slow to resist and open to change. The task for educators and policymakers is to help countries rise to this challenge.

Differentiate Instruction

I have used activities to differentiated instruction in my class. Here, I would like to describe about an activity I have ever used in my classroom.  16 students were grouped into 4, each contained 4 students. If a teacher is to do the activity to differentiated instruction, group forming is important. The teacher need to be careful that all members of the group are interested in and eager for what the task is for them. For example, just shown in the movie segment, the group members for writing lyrics need to be willing to perform their task, and so do other groups.
Then, I gave each group a set of flash cards on which variety of tasks had been written. Each group got the equal chance to choose a flash card with the task which all group members agreed and were willing to perform. At that point, the teacher needs to be carefully to choose the tasks from which students can improve their language skills and benefits. After that, each group performed the activity of their chosen task.
I circulated around groups and helps with ideas, vocabulary, and other things. Assessment was done by means of monitoring and peer assessment.
The great advantages of that activity is that students are more motivated and more interested in the task they are performing as the task is in accordance with their hobby or the areas they are good at. As the result, students gain language skill competencies more than when they are performing normally assigned tasks. In addition to that, the learning environment becomes more enjoyable and beneficial. Very effective!

Classroom Management

I have ever worked in a big maritime university. There, the size of English language classes is very big, usually 50 to 75 students per class and sometimes even 100 students. As Rhoades suggested in his article, the larger the class is, the more important it is to use group work so that all students can get the equal opportunity to practice English during class time. So, I always try to teach students by using using work to be able to give students that chance. However, as the class size is very big, I always encounter many difficulties in doing so.

If a class size is 55, I ask students to form 8 groups containing 7 members in each. Then I assign each group a task on language lesson. The difficulty is that, for 8 groups, I am the only instructor. So, even if I circulate in the classroom and when I am assisting a group with their task, some other groups are in chaos and some other groups become very passive. If there is one or more persistent talker in a group, other members do not participate in the group discussion.

Reflective Teaching

The traditional way of teaching is to pour knowledge from the teacher to the students. In fact, teaching is much more than that because this means of teaching can only give students knowledge of what they are learning. In reality, a teacher is responsible, if one thinks himself/herself as a real teacher, not only for students getting knowledge of the subject, but also for the total and all-round development of the skills in students. The responsibility of a teacher, therefore, is not limited to pouring of knowledge to students. In additional to that, other things such as the development of competency, the improvement of performances, and the appropriate use of language, are the parts of a teacher's responsibility. As the saying goes, teacher is everything.

Therefore, to able to fulfill these responsibilities as a teacher, in turn, he or she needs to be always reflecting teaching, finding strengths and weaknesses of the approach used and modifying it to be more and more effective. To do so, a teacher needs to gather information about his or her teaching and it can gain via many ways. In this module of week 5, some useful ways are described both in reading and in video lesson. These means of getting information are very effective for a teacher to reflect his or her teaching.

Here, I would like to express about the situation in Myanmar. I am very lucky that I can apply all the means described in reading. However, most of the language teachers in State schools cannot apply all these means. All teachers can write Teacher diary, but it takes time. Although it is a very good habit, according to my experience, most teachers in Myanmar cannot do so because of the time constraint. I think, teachers in Myanmar are the ones who spend most of the time in teaching all over the world. As the salary of a teacher in Myanmar is very low, they have to go privately teaching classes to earn extra money even after their official teaching in their respective schools. But, even if, they cannot write Teacher Diary, they think about their teaching of the day at night, and they reflect it for tomorrow's teaching. I am the one among them.

What most of the teachers including me can do and always do is Peer Observation. Whenever we get chances, we gather with other colleagues in a place such as dining table or tea shop and we talk about our experiences in teaching and other peer teachers give comments and suggestions. By doing so, we reflect our teaching.

The other means which is Recording lessons  cannot be done most of teacher in Myanmar cannot be done. Although I can do it if I want to do so, I have never done such a kind of means for collecting information about my teaching. This means however is also a good one for the reflective teaching.

Student Feedback, I think, is the most important one for the teachers If they want to reflect their teaching because students are the only directly engaged ones in teaching. So, feedback from students are the valuable information for a teacher to evaluate how effective and to reflect his or her teaching. As well as other teachers, I always do this kind of gathering information and I always encourage my students to give feedback and open criticism to me.

Cooperative & Collaborative learning

Cooperative and collaborative are the confusing words in pedagogy. As much as I know, in cooperative work, the teacher gives tasks to the groups of students and students perform the task usually with the aid of teacher. It is the content-based approach of interactive learning and it can also be regarded as teacher-oriented and the teacher is concerned as the authority.

On the other hand, collaborative work is the task-based and the learner-centered. The authority is not the teacher, but students themselves. The teacher and the task guidelines are regarded as the learning resources and the students are in control of their own learning. No one in the group takes as a team leader and inputs on the tasks performed come from every team members.

Introducing Argument

To attempt someone to do something, to buy something, and to believe something, we can utilize many means, such as state-of-the-art, rhetorical, and argument. Of these means argument is the one in which attempt is made by giving a good reason to someone to believe something, to accept what is being, and to do what is supposed to.

In a research, the researcher expresses a research question. Then, s/he posts the literature review to make audience understand what others have developed in the area being researched. Next, s/he needs to put forward the findings in the argumentative way. That means giving audience the reasons about what is happening, what should be done, where is the cause of something originated in, and so on.

In introducing an argument, s/he presents a set of propositions in which the main point or the conclusion is normally presented at the end. The researcher presents premises first to support the main reason of an argument and finally comes the main reason. In analyzing arguments, the audience need to identify, reconstruct, and evaluate them to get the clear concept of what is being attempted. Good arguments can provide good reasons to accept a claim.

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