April 2003 — Features
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Redesigning Schools to Meet 21st Century Learning Needs
- We must redesign schools for teaching and learning success.
- We must redesign the teacher-preparation system so that it becomes closely articulated with the teaching conditions in today's schools and the learning needs of our students.
- We must continue to support professional development and career growth after developing high-quality teachers and placing them in schools where learning can thrive.
This article will focus on the first of these strategies: creating schools where teaching and learning succeed.
Successful Learning Environments
To help each child prepare for successful employment and productive citizenship in the 21st century, all teachers must deeply know their subject areas, understand how children learn, use modern learning technologies effectively, and work closely with their colleagues to create rich learning environments that produce high-quality learning experiences for every child.
Over the last decade, brain research and studies in cognition and the social sciences have given us a clearer picture of how people learn. This research has identified four key elements of successful learning environments - attributes equally relevant for the success of teachers as adult learners - with powerful implications for the organization of the learning environments we call school (Bransford, Brown and Cocking 1999):
Learner-centered learning environments. A learner-centered environment signifies that teachers know and attend to the knowledge, skills, beliefs and backgrounds each child brings to the classroom. It implies that the time it takes from "learning to mastery" will vary with every child, as will the style of learning that works best for each child. The current factory-model school, while seemingly efficient, is, in fact, grossly inefficient, inappropriate and ultimately inequitable, as it requires that all children adapt to the mean. Those who do not learn at the speed of the assembly line lose out and/or drop out; those who could learn more, do not. Individualizing instruction for each learner is no longer a dream - it is an educational birthright for all children.
Assessment-centered learning environments. Assessment-centered learning environments make learner-centered instruction possible by continually providing feedback on what is being learned; with revisions made as needed. They build on just-in-time, ongoing formative assessments that make thinking visible by showing what is understood and where stumbling blocks occur. They help both students and teachers monitor the learning in progress, so that extra effort or new strategies can be tried before it's too late. While both formative and end-of-course summative assessments are important pieces of an assessment-centered learning environment, it is the formative assessment that is most powerful for adapting instruction to the learner. Yet, it's the most often ignored.
Knowledge-centered learning environments. A focus on the learner d'es not mean that content is ignored. Rather, knowledge-centered teaching and learning signify that attention is given to what is taught, how it is taught, and what mastery or understanding of this content looks like.
