21st Century Problems

Meeting the needs of today's students can be a daunting task, for new and experienced educators alike. Today's students are digital natives, having grown up in a world where technology is not only in nearly every household, but also in nearly every pocket. Despite the fact that our students are digital natives, the majority of them lack experience in using technology in ways that are explicitly educational. The paradox of students who grew up using technology, but can't really use technology is one that educators today find themselves facing. Add to that the plethora of standards demanding that our students be "digitally literate" and "college and career ready" with "21st Century skills," and the ability to "communicate and collaborate," and it's enough to make any teacher want to throw his or her hands in the air and ask, "How the heck am I supposed to do all of that?"

Fortunately, it might not be as impossible as it seems. It will, however, take patience, a willingness to step outside of established ways of doing things, and thoughtful planning (plus the ability to improvise when things suddenly take a turn you didn't expect). 

Providing students with a well-designed, thoughtfully-produced project to complete in collaboration with other students is one way to help meet the demands of 21st-century learning (see P21 for a breakdown), as well as a plethora of standards, including Common Core Literacy Standards and ISTE-Student Standards.

All of these standards have common themes running through them that can be summed up with the 4 C's (Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking). For the sake of expedience, I will focus on the ISTE-Student Standards (formerly NETS-S) as an example. The ISTE-Student Standards have six areas of focus, and each of them can be supported through a thoughtfully produced project. Here is a breakdown of how one project can help students meet a the ISTE-Student standards:

• Standard 1: Creativity and innovation 
• A well-thought out project will provide students with an opportunity to learn more about a topic and generate an original solution to a problem. Students have a chance to learn about solutions that already exist, explore alternatives, and create their own solutions.
• Standard 2: Communication and collaboration
• Students can use technology to communicate and collaborate in a variety of ways to achieve the objectives of a project. Students may need to collaborate with each other online in order to complete projects when they don't have time to meet face-to-face. They may also use technology to help them find experts to consult to learn more about the problem they are trying to solve, or to collaborate with experts to help find a solution.
• Standard 3: Research and information fluency
• When students are given an open-ended problem to solve, they have to figure out where to start. Often, this starts as a question in the Google search bar, but students rapidly figure out (sometimes with the gentle-- or not-so-gentle-- guidance of a teacher) that they must learn how to frame both their questions and their searches in a way that directs them to the information they are looking for. 
• This is where the art of designing the project comes in: a project that is too broad may make it difficult to for students to learn where to look, but a project that is too narrow or prescriptive may limit students' opportunity to learn from their own successes and failures.
• Standard 4: Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making 
• When students are faced with solving an appropriately challenging problem, they must learn to make decisions about everything: what information is relevant? Is it from a trustworthy source? How does what I learned relate to the project I'm working on? How do I manage my time to make sure I complete the assignment? How do I deal with problems I didn't anticipate?
• Students who successfully complete a project that has required them to address these types of questions are students who have taken a significant step toward meeting Standard 4. 
• Standard 5: Digital citizenship
• Students who engage in a successful project must learn to navigate the Web as a place where others live. They must learn the etiquette of online interaction and realize that there are people on the other side of their screen. Engaging in a project in which students collaborate with classmates and consult with experts in a digital environment makes the idea of the people behind the screen real in a way that few other experiences can.
• The other key component of digital citizenship is giving credit where it's due. The process of citing sources and obtaining appropriate permission before sharing another person's work as part of the project reinforces the importance of ethical use of digital content. 
• Standard 6: Technology operations and concepts
• As part of a project that incorporates 21st Century learning goals, students need to be able to publish and share their work on a global scale. They have the opportunity to select the medium that is most important for sharing their work with its intended audience, and they have the responsibility of learning how to make their choice work. Web 2.0 applications provide students with an abundance of choices for publishing their work in an engaging and original way.

While this is just a brief breakdown, I hope it illustrates how a single project can help address a number of standards (I didn't even get into the other standards that overlap the ISTE-Students Standards). 

A project that is thoughtfully designed, with a clear learning outcome in mind, is a project that invites students to create their own learning experience. 

That, my fellow educators, is what learning is really all about.