The Pedagogy of the 21st Century

New Thinking Skills Evolving

Gareth Mitchell, host of the BBC program 'Click' and one of technology's foremost journalists, says new thinking skills are needed in this age when rote learning is not required. In a UGotClass online chat last month he said,

"Rote learning is less important when we can just call up facts from this rich cloud of information at any time in any place.

"The skills for coming generations and those that teach them will be how to weigh all that information up: how to rate the relative veracity of stuff on Wikipedia, the websites of learned journals, Twitter, university websites, government etc. To thrive and succeed, our children will have to become fully digital citizens.

"The ones who do best won"t be the ones best at revising for exams but who navigate their way through the digital space, filtering, thinking, analysing and evaluating as they go."

The History of Unmotivated Students

Remember when YOU were an unmotivated student?  No, well your teachers do.

For 3,000 years, teachers have always felt their students were unmotivated.  You and I were unanimously regarded as unmotivated by our teachers.

My father's best friend told me that his generation was universally castigated as unmotivated in 1939. Two years later, with Pearl Harbor that unmotivated generation became the "greatest generation," saving the world.

There is absolutely no data-based evidence that young people today, or ever, are or were unmotivated. 

We would suggest that we as teachers should assume each and every student is motivated, and that while difficult, our job is to stir, enflame and encourage that inherent desire to learn that may or may not appear to be there. Photo: More fall color.

Dealing with Unmotivated Students

Here's the key to dealing with unmotivated students:  don't think of them as unmotivated.

Last week I was consulting with a college that identified one of its major student segments as "Uninspired," complete with pictures of frowning students.  Now, some 25% of these uninspired students were making over $100,000 a year, and I'm thinking......

Then this week the first day, the first comment, of my online course and a teacher makes the standard comment:

"Sometimes the first thing I think of is that they are unmotivated...." 

Having mentored low income minority boys from single parent households with no access to a computer, I have yet to find an "unmotivated" student.  Now, they might not be motivated about Math 5 in week 7 and on page 172 at age 11 (or 12 or 22 or...) but that does not mean they are not motivated.

We as teachers have to assume that every student is motivated. That's our job.

We would suggest that we as teachers should assume each and every student is motivated, and that while difficult, our job is to stir, enflame and encourage that inherent desire to learn that may or may not appear to be there.  Photo: Bluestem prairie grass in a nearby state park this fall.

Online Learning Has a Practical Financial Side, but

I think it's important to keep in mind that the fundamental reason why students are learning with the web, and why we as teachers should be teaching using the web, is that it enhances learning.

Last week I was in Calgary, Alberta, and there was a big story about how some rural school systems were considering four day weeks, with students learning online at home the fifth day.

The reason was budgetary, with buses costing huge dollars. And more parents feeling that spending up to 4 hours on a bus is wasted time for their children. And that's all true. And there ARE practical positive financial outcomes and implications for using the web in the classroom.

But the fundamental reason is that it is an essential learning tool. It's not really about money. It's really about learning.

Photo: Soccer field at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), located on top of a parking garage and overlooking a beautiful sight of the downtown Calgary skyline.