Learning by Doing: Pathways to High Performance Students

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Learning by Doing: Pathways to High Performance Students

7/5/2005

By Edward J. Barboni
Senior Advisor,
Council of Independent Colleges,
and Independent Consultant

I was re-reading “Learning for the 21st Century” the other day as background material on a forthcoming undergraduate teacher preparation project. I was struck by how well the report navigates the political waters of educational reform, so decided to use this Viewpoint to bring this report to the attention of those who have not yet read it. It deserves widespread attention, particularly among those of us engaged in improving undergraduate teacher preparation programs.

The report gives due respect to standardized testing, disciplinary content coverage, and other traditional concerns of the educational enterprise. However, it positively and constructively moves the reader toward best practices in designing active learning environments for students of all ages, and toward authentic assessment tools that may be used to progress toward reaching the goal of each student achieving high standards of performance associated with meaningful learning outcomes.

Upon reflection, this isn’t surprising because the report was commissioned by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (www.21stcenturyskills.org/), a public-private organization formed in 2002 to create a successful model of learning for this millennium that incorporates 21st Century skills into the nation’s system of education. Its members are the AOL Time Warner Foundation, Apple Computer, Inc., Cable in the Classroom, Cisco Systems, Inc., Dell Computer Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, the National Education Association, and SAP. The corporate members of this partnership are truly “learning organizations” whose employees must continuously improve their ability to collaboratively create knowledge and to design products and services that provide solutions to their customers’ needs. In turn, these customers must collaboratively create knowledge to design products and services that will provide solutions to their customers’ needs; and the chain continues. It also reaches back to the nation’s schools, colleges, and universities to provide the knowledge industry with the employees called upon to continuously learn. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is not satisfied with our performance both with respect to the graduates they hire and the future teachers we send into the nation’s schools each year to prepare the knowledge workers of the future. But their dissatisfaction, adroitly articulated in their report, moves the reader to a practical solution.

Before sharing their answer with you, allow me to share some experiences which create a context for it. One experience was having lunch for the first time in one of Microsoft’s cafeterias at their Redmond, Washington campus. It was like being at the United Nations! The experience was a tangible reminder of the importance of ensuring that undergraduate students develop the capacity to learn and work in teams of people whose backgrounds are quite different from their own. This is not an option at Microsoft, it is a requirement, and Microsoft and other knowledge organizations want to take for granted that the nation’s college graduates have these abilities and have had these earlier experiences.