How committed are we to creating 21st Century Learners?

In our quest to continually evolve into 21^st century educators, one thing always stands in our way… Standardized testing.  I wanted to probe more into how the two fit together and perhaps some rational behind how the higher powers feel that these tests will help create the learners of the future. 

I finally stumbled on J. Robinson, ‘The 21^st Century Principal’ who is trying to come to grips with how we can devise an assessment for 21^st century skills.   The basis of the blog is that our assessment are outdated because “they are bound by three destructive conditions; standardized conditions, secrecy of content and individual results”. 

He goes on to present research from Douglas Reeves who wrote, “A Framework for Assessing in the 21^st century”.  Reeves believes that we need to get away from comparing students through their ability to perform in standardized environments.  Instead they need to be in real world conditions where they will solve problems in the future.  Also, because collaboration is a major key to the 21^st century learner, we should have them solve problems as teams, and not individuals.  And finally, he thinks that we should move away from comparing students by letting them know what the assessment is on, so they can prepare and create their own ideas.

I decided to read this article because this was one of our school goals last year, creating a 21^st century global learning.  Ironically, we were still basing all of our major assessments on standardized test.  In one breath, we were drilled on the importance of critical thinking, exploration, collaboration and inquiry based lessons, but in the next breath we were breaking down the data of standardized tests and creating plans to boost these scores.  This article made me realize how far apart these two ideals are. 

I have been teaching for 10 years and we are still doing the same reading assessment (CASI) that we did when I started.  My teaching style has evolved but our assessment has not.   Why is that???

My guess is that everyone is needs evidence in education to prove that something good is happening.  As public servants we need to validate ourselves through subjecting students and schools into a comparison battle of who is the best and who is the worst.

Through a bit of searching, it is relieving to know that finding a newer assessments for 21^st century learners might be on the way.  For instance, Learning.com has a 21^st Century assessment that they say designed for the new types of learning.  For instance, the test is broken up into these 6 strands.

Creativity and Innovation

Communication and Collaboration

Research and Information Fluency

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making

Digital Citizenship

In the limited amount of research that I have done, I can see that this is on the minds of more people that just J. Robinson and Douglas Reeves.  There are communities of innovative educators pushing for change.  I just hope is comes before the 22^nd Century learners are in front of us!