21st Century Teaching needs a curriculum which is interdisciplinary, integrated and project-based and incorporates the skills advocated in the book, The Global Achievement Gap:

 

• Critical thinking and problem solving

• Collaboration across networks and leading by influence

• Agility and adaptability

• Initiative and Entrepreneurialism

• Effective oral and written communication

• Accessing and analysing information

• Curiosity and imagination

 

Today's and future students are digital natives who have been immersed in the 21st century media culture.

 

These digital learners make decisions every day about their learning through the information they choose to take in via mobile phones, tablets, gaming devices and laptops that they take everywhere.

 

Though are students are digital natives their usage of technology is typically for entertainment and they are not media literate.  One of the many challenges that face our education systems is to change this.

 

Our students need to become truly media literate as their future jobs will rely on them being able to function in an online, research-based environment such skills as researching, analysing, synthesising, critiquing, evaluating and creating new knowledge will be required.

 

21st Century learning therefore requires engaging students in addressing real-world problems, issues important to humanity, and questions that matter.

 

This is a dramatic departure from the 19th century factory model of schooling from the past.  We need to abandon the textbook-driven, teacher-centred, paper and pen schools of the past and design and deliver a curriculum that 21st century students can both relate to and learn from.

 

Digital technologies are the drivers of change in this adaptation of education to the needs of the learners.

 

Icon Education offers resources to support teachers in 21st century teaching.  Starting in 2015 with digital lectures which allow teachers a choice in the daily timing of their lessons.  Teachers can choose to have students watch the lectures for homework thereby freeing up class time for a range of learning activities in a flipped classroom model.  Alternatively, teachers can set students the task of watching the lectures during class time, but they do this and work through subsequent activities at their own pace giving teachers the opportunity to spend greater time and attention on those students who require it.

 

Using digital lectures gives teachers the choice to more easily differentiate the work in their classrooms so that all students are able to work at their own level and pace.  This gives greater scope to teachers in ensuring the engagement of students and that they are all being appropriately challenged - working within Vygotsky's 'zone of proximal development' which leads to better outcomes for all students no matter their learning ability.