BLOCK PARTY PROTOCOL Text: 21 Century Learning Quotes

BLOCK PARTY PROTOCOL
Text: 21st Century Learning Quotes
Purpose of this Activity:
Opportunity to introduce 21st Century teaching and Learning
considerations into the room with text chunks to stimulate thinking
Process:
1. Select 1 quote per participant (8 quotes total):
a. Independently reflect on what your quote means and make
connections to your work
b. Jot thinking on back side of quote. (3 minutes)
2. Mingle to Form Group of 3-4 with unlike quotes
(15 minutes)
a. Share your quote
b. Insights gained from the quote
c. Implications to our work
3. Meet in Quote Alike Groups
a. Reread the groups common quote as a group
b. Dialogue and charts insights and implications
4. Whole Group:
a. Round robin style, each group share groups thinking
b. Whole group dialogue after all groups have shared
i. Implications to our work
ii. questions raised by this learning process
21st Century Learning - Quotes
“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be
transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build
achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where
they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.
Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the
future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.
So, my argument is that instead of standardizing everything in schools, we should be going in the
opposite direction. I don’t think there’s a kid in America, or anywhere in the world, who gets out of bed
in the morning wondering what they can do to raise their state’s reading standards. They get out of bed,
if they’re motivated, by their own interests and their own development. So I think we should be doing
the opposite. I think we should be personalizing everything in schools. We should be looking at ways of
making education relevant to each individual child. And there’s no other way of improving standards.
Actually, there’s no other way of doing it on the grand scale.
Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability. and at the
heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and intelligence”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
“Massive changes brought about by population growth, technology, and globalization not only demand
but also create opportunities for “mass entrepreneurship” and thus require everyone to be globally
minded, creative, and entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship is no longer limited to starting or owning a
business, but is expanded to social entrepreneurship, policy entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship.
Traditional schooling aims to prepare employees rather than creative entrepreneurs. As a result the more
successful traditional schooling is (often measured by test scores in a few subjects), the more it stifles
creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit.
To cultivate creative and entrepreneurial talents is much more than adding an entrepreneurship course
or program to the curriculum. It requires a paradigm shift—from employee-oriented education to
entrepreneur-oriented education, from prescribing children’s education to supporting their learning, and
from reducing human diversity to a few employable skills to enhancing individual talents.”
-Yong Zhao, World Class Learners
“(Learning the content) is very much the 20th century idea around education. But in the 21st century, it’s
learning the tools and the skills of remaking that content and becoming the creator and the producer. We
know that the learning outside of school matters tremendously for the learning in school…How can we be
more active about linking those two together?”
-Diana Roten, Director of the Digital Media and Learning Project
“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
-Albert Einstein
21st Century Learning - Quotes
“For teachers, and schools, and classroom learning, there’s an incredibly important role to play which is
about giving kids access across the board to a baseline of standards, literacies, expectations, about what
they need to participate in contemporary society…to be reflective, and to also take opportunity of the fact
that you really have kids and adults in a shared space that’s safe, that’s sanctioned, that gives an
opportunity to reflect in everyday life….What we’re saying by valuing informal learning is not that we
should abandon formal learning, but that we should get those working together in a much more
coordinated way.”
-Mimi Ito, Associate Researcher, UC Irvine
“The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot
learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
-
Alvin Toffle
-
“21st Century change is by design emergent and organic in nature. Implementation from my experience
never goes completely according to plan. People react in unexpected ways; areas of anticipated resistance
fall away; and the external environment shifts etc. To manage the needed shifts in your school, the
community will need to continually reassess. This is why ownership is so important. Each wave of
adoption of the transformational change process will have its own tensions and unexpected outcomes.
Data driven decision-making will help inform your strategies somewhat, but realize along the way that
much of this is so new- that we do not know what we do not know. We are often "building this airplane
while we are flying it."
As the Individual Grows so Will the Collective Wisdom of the Community. Change is both an institutional
journey and a very personal one. Educators spend many hours each week at school; many think of their
colleagues as a second family- and as their community away from home. Individuals (or teams of
individuals) yearn to know how their work will change, what is expected of them during and after the
change, how they will be measured, and what success or failure will mean for them and those around
them. But the truth is- so much of this change is emergent that we simply do not know how to answer
these important questions. To quote Peter Vaill,"... it as if we are all in constant whitewater."
As you contemplate the needed change in your schools, make it your mantra to chant "people matter." It
is all too tempting to dwell on the tasks at hand and the rationale behind what you are trying to
accomplish rather than deal with the more difficult and more critical "people issues." But in the 21st
Century, bottom line is that relationships are all that matter. It is no longer about information
management and prescriptive outcomes, but rather about building capacity- in ourselves, our faculty, our
staff and in our students and then being able to contextualize the collective wisdom we gain through
those relationships to making the world a better place.”
-D. Turner United Kingdom, International Review of Education
21st Century Learning - Quotes
“We find when we talk about 21st century skills, people often reduce them to skills for the workplace and
skills involving technology. And we’re really talking about skills for creativity, for civic engagement, for
social life–the full range of experiences that young people will be involved in in the future.”
-Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor of Communications
National
School
Reform
Faculty
Harmony
Education
Center
www.nsrfharmony.org
BlockParty
APre-ReadingText-BasedActivity
AdaptedbyDebbieBambinofromKyleneBeerspre-readingstrategy
Thisactivitycanbeusedwithavarietyoftexts,poems,articlesorwholebooks.Itworkswellwithlarge
groups.
1.Facilitatorwritesquotesonindexcardspriortosession.Youmaychooseonequoteperparticipant,or
repeatsomequotes.
2.Participantsrandomlyselectquotes/cardsandspendafewminutesreflectingupontheirquote’s
meaningforthemandtheirwork.(3minutes)
3.Participantsmingleandsharequotesinpairs.Participantsareencouragedtosharewiththreeother
participantsin5minutesegments.(15minutes)
4.(Optional)Formtriadsorquadsandsharequotesandinsightsaboutthetextanditsimplicationsforour
work.(Extension:Speculateonthepurpose/originofthetext.)(12-15minutes)
5.Wholegroupsharingofideasandquestionsraisedbytheexperience.Thiscanbedonepopcornstyle
orasaround,butisusuallynotaconversation.(10-12minutes)
6.Facilitatorsharesthesourceofthequotes,postingthelink,distributingthearticleetc.forfuturework.
(1minute)
7.Debrieftheprocess(5minutes)
Note:AttheNationalFacilitator’sMeetinginChicagothefollowingpossibilitieswereshared:1)Have
participantsexchangecards/quotesaftereachround.2)Usethisformattoshareendofyearreflections
orstartupaspirations.3)Usingquotesfromlongerpiecescanopenuptheconversationinlarge,mixed
groupswherestudentsandfamilymembersmighthavepreviouslybeenexcludedfromthediscussionof
thematerial.
ProtocolsaremostpowerfulandeffectivewhenusedwithinanongoingprofessionallearningcommunitysuchasaCriticalFriendsGroup®andfacilitated
byaskilledcoach.Tolearnmoreaboutprofessionallearningcommunitiesandseminarsforneworexperiencedcoaches,pleasevisittheNationalSchool
ReformFacultywebsiteatwww.nsrfharmony.org.