Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Dailies-Allison Knox Keynote

Each day, the director of a movie checks the dailies to see if the filming is acceptable progress toward the vision he or she has for the film. Allison used the analogy to encourage us as teachers and educators and especially as leaders to continually check our progress toward our 21st century learning goals. She shared statistics showing that 99% of voters think 21st century skills need to be taught in today's schools and the greatest skill needed by employers is critical thinking--with innovation coming in fourth, just a few percentage points lower.

We need to ask ourselves if our dailies are ensuring that our students will have critical thinking skills. We need to focus on the higher levels of the new Anderson taxonomy that puts evaluation and creativity at the top. We need to continue to campaign for creativity and innovation in our schools, and to provide evidence that students are on the 21st century learning pathway. How can we do this? What practical things are we doing already? What needs to change?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The idea of 'checking the dailys' is a great analogy for teachers. We need to become more introspective of what our daily actions are in the classroom that open the possibliities for students to be
21st Century Learners. This is a huge responsibility but one we need to follow through on! Our students futures depend on this.