Implementing Deeper Learning And 21st Century Education Reforms

This open access book is a comparative analysis of recent large scale education reforms that broadened curriculum goals to better prepare students for the 21st century. The book examines what governments actually do when they broaden curriculum goals, with attention to the details of implementation. To this end, the book examines system level reforms in six countries at various levels of development. The study includes system level reforms in jurisdictions where students achieve high levels in international assessments of basic literacies, such as Singapore and Ontario, Canada, as well as in nations where students achieve much lower levels, such as Kenya, Mexico, Punjab-Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The chapters examine system-level reforms that focus on strengthening the capacity to teach the basics, as in Ontario and Pakistan, as well as reforms that aim at building the capacity to teach a much broader set of competencies and skills, such as Kenya, Mexico, Singapore and Zimbabwe. The volume includes systems at very different levels of spending per student and reforms at various points in the cycle of policy implementation, some just starting, some struggling to survive a governmental transition, and others that have been in place for an extended period of time. From the comparative study of these reforms, we aim to provide an understanding of how to build the capacity of education systems to teach 21st century skills at scale in diverse settings.

This book details six key arguments for why educators must approach schooling differently in the 21st century: information literacy, the economy, learning, boredom, innovation, and equity. It examines what makes traditional school reforms counterproductive, the building blocks of deeper learning schools, the research that proves deeper learning environments enhance results, and examples of deeper learning schools showing emerging organizational and instructional models.

Americans have long recognized that investments in public education contribute to the common good, enhancing national prosperity and supporting stable families, neighborhoods, and communities. Education is even more critical today, in the face of economic, environmental, and social challenges. Today's children can meet future challenges if their schooling and informal learning activities prepare them for adult roles as citizens, employees, managers, parents, volunteers, and entrepreneurs. To achieve their full potential as adults, young people need to develop a range of skills and knowledge that facilitate mastery and application of English, mathematics, and other school subjects. At the same time, business and political leaders are increasingly asking schools to develop skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and self-management - often referred to as "21st century skills." Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century describes this important set of key skills that increase deeper learning, college and career readiness, student-centered learning, and higher order thinking. These labels include both cognitive and non-cognitive skills- such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, effective communication, motivation, persistence, and learning to learn. 21st century skills also include creativity, innovation, and ethics that are important to later success and may be developed in formal or informal learning environments. This report also describes how these skills relate to each other and to more traditional academic skills and content in the key disciplines of reading, mathematics, and science. Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century summarizes the findings of the research that investigates the importance of such skills to success in education, work, and other areas of adult responsibility and that demonstrates the importance of developing these skills in K-16 education. In this report, features related to learning these skills are identified, which include teacher professional development, curriculum, assessment, after-school and out-of-school programs, and informal learning centers such as exhibits and museums.

This open access book presents a comparative study on how large-scale professional development programs for teachers are designed and implemented. Around the world, governments and educators are recognizing the need to educate students in a broad range of higher order cognitive skills and socio-emotional competencies, and providing effective opportunities for teachers to develop the expertise needed to teach these skills is a crucial aspect of effective implementation of curricula which include those goals. This study examines how large-scale efforts to empower teachers for deeper instruction have been designed, how they have been implemented, and their outcomes. To do so, it investigates six programs from England, Colombia, Mexico, India, and the United States. Though all six are intended to broaden and deepen students’ curricular aspirations, each takes this expansion of curricular goals in a different direction. The ambitious education reforms studied here explicitly focus on building teachers’ capacity to teach on a broader set of goals. Through a discerning analysis of program documents, evaluations, and interviews with senior leaders and participants in the programs, the book identifies the various theories of action used in these programs, examines how they were implemented, and discusses what they achieved. As such, it offers an indispensable resource for education leaders interested in designing and implementing professional development programs for teachers that are aligned with ambitious instructional goals.

The acclaimed exploration of how public education can cultivate innovators—with a foreword by Russlynn Ali, a leading advocate for remaking schools Dime-a-dozen ideas for reforming education seem to be everywhere these days but few actually transform the everyday experience of the 50-million-plus students who are regularly subjected to traditional lecturing, note-taking, and rote learning—often with dismal results. Enter Deeper Learning, "a fast read [that] will interest educators who want to produce self-motivated, passionate learners" (Library Journal). Offering "uplifting" (Kirkus Reviews) anecdotes in what Tom Carroll of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future calls a "rare blend of inspiration and practical action," Deeper Learning provides a blueprint for creating flexible environments that put students at the helm of their own collaborative learning experience. This paperback edition includes a new foreword by renowned education advocate Russlynn Ali and will empower and inspire educators everywhere to address the need for schools to be genuinely innovative.

Education authorities from around the globe explore deeper learning, a process that promotes higher-order thinking, reasoning, and problem solving to better educate students and prepare them for college and careers. Relying on research as well as their own experience, the authors show how to use intensive curriculum, instruction, assessment, and leadership practices to meet the needs of 21st century learners.

This book brings together a variety of connected voices which consider potential ways forward for school reform. By demonstrating how the ‘subject-centered’ and ‘student-centered’ models of education can, and have been working together in various contexts, the text sets out a compelling case for an emerging movement that unites ideologies and pedagogical traditions which have traditionally been considered to be at odds with one another. In drawing from historical sources, the full range of contemporary research, and a series of investigations led by the authors, this book documents the deep back-story of school reform, and explains the powerful and largely unacknowledged consensus on what constitutes excellence in teaching and learning. This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of school reform and educational leadership. It will also appeal to graduate students, researchers and postgraduates in the fields of history of education, educational leadership, teaching and learning, and curriculum studies.

This open access book examines the implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for education systems and argues that major education reforms will be necessary, particularly in the Global South, to address the learning loss caused by the pandemic. To inform those reforms, knowledge about the implementation reforms in the Global South is necessary, and such knowledge is seriously lacking as the existing literature on the implementation of educational change focused principally in reforms in countries in the Global North. This book contributes to address this gap by examining five major education reforms in India, Egypt, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Senegal, and by presenting two novel approaches to climate change education using a bottoms up strategy of reform. The chapters examine the implementation process drawing on a theoretical model of educational change by Reimers (published in Educating Students to Improve the World by Springer in 2020). The book concludes discussing the implementation of such reforms as an evolutionary and learning process, characterized by four dimensions: the goals of the reform, the drivers of the reform, the reform strategy, and the mindsets about educational change which undergird the implementation strategy.