Teaching the Teachers

Learning by doing is often the most effective way of teaching—and perhaps not coincidentally, not only part of the 21st Century Skills being implemented in Warren schools, but also how teachers began preparing to institute the new methodology.

A group of 31 teachers from across the district spend Monday and Tuesday learning how to implement the new methodology using many of the same skills they will need to be teaching.

At its core, the 21st Century Skills means teaching students the skills most needed in today's workplace: collaborative thinking, creativity and problem solving.

But how do teachers incorporate that into lesson plans focused on teaching the still crucial "3 R's"?

Superintendent Tami Crader said the key is to use scenarios for students to work through—much like the lessons one finds in teaching science with experiments, but extending that to social studies, language and other classes.

"They are creating the scenarios that give kids more hands-on, more open possibilities for creating solutions," Dr. Crader said. She had been working with four, fourth-grade teachers devising a scenario for teaching their social studies lessons on "Early Explorers," Mt. Horeb's Jola Scassera, Christina Ulloa and Katie Didia of ALT, and Colleen Krumm from Woodland School. 

The teachers devised a plan built around asking students to put themselves in the shoes of, say, Christopher Columbus: What supplies would be needed for such a voyage? What other people would be needed—first mates, deck hands, etc.? And what would be the budget and financing for the journey?

"What these tasks are aiming to do is get the students thinking on their own," Didia said.

As Lee Crockett, author of the book "Understanding the Digital Generation" which outlines the need for changing education, said, the challenge is in restructuring the way teachers think.

"If we're going to teach students skills in the 21st Century based in the 20th Century, we've trained them for success in our past and not their future," he said. Crockett added teachers have spent most of their lives in classrooms—even as adults—so seeing the possibilities of using different methods can be difficult.

Which is why these teachers spent two days in the middle school library, hashing out not only a variety of scenarios to take back to their schools and try out, but also to discuss how to implement the plans throughout the schools.

The teachers kicked around their thoughts on how quickly to implement such scenarios, as well as when to meet again to review their successes and challenges in the classrooms.

Other issues discussed included grading students, creating homework assignments and helping parents understand the new methodology.