21st Century Learning Design (21CLD)

• In Event: 60.052 - Promoting Equitable Access to 21st-Century Skills: Global and Local Designs for Professional Learning

Abstract

Objectives
This paper describes the design of the 21st Century Learning Design (21CLD) program that is the focus of this symposium. This global program helps teachers design lessons that include opportunities for students to develop a range of 21st century competencies.

Framework and Origins
21CLD grew out of a global multi-year research program called Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research (Shear, Gallagher, & Patel, 2011), which studied ICT-enabled educational innovation across a wide range of countries. The conceptual framework that grounds both programs is grounded in decades of research in the learning sciences (e.g., Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; OECD, 2010) and leading international frameworks for 21st century skills (e.g., ISTE, 2008; Law, Pelgrum, & Plomp, 2008).

In 21CLD, primary elements of 21st century teaching and student skills are defined as six dimensions that research has tied to improved student outcomes: collaboration, knowledge construction, skilled communication, real-world problem-solving and innovation, use of ICT for learning, and self-regulation. The focus of the program is the lesson (or “learning activity”) and the opportunities it provides for students to learn and practice these skills. Based on a toolset developed in ITL Research and validated in multiple countries (Gallagher et al., 2011), 21CLD provides detailed definitions, examples and rubrics for each of these dimensions that help teachers analyse the strength of a given lesson through the lens of that dimension. For example, in this lesson, how strong are students’ opportunities to construct knowledge, to collaborate in meaningful ways, or to use ICT to deepen learning?

Program Design
The 21CLD program comprises:
1) A workshop in which teachers engage actively in teams to explore each dimension, apply the rubrics to weak and strong exemplars to learn to recognize learning activities that do and do not promote these skills, and act as lesson designers, and
2) An ongoing system of supports as teachers design, teach, and reflect on lessons in their own curriculum.

This paper will describe core workshop design. The design of ongoing supports is necessarily specific to the context in which implementation is taking place, as the other papers in this session will describe.

The workshop is designed to model the type of learning environment it seeks to promote, with active facilitated group interactions rather than lecture, and strong opportunities for collaboration and problem-solving (for example) that would achieve a high score on the related rubrics. To engage participants in relevant, real-world activities rather than disconnected theory, the groups work with practical models and with examples from their own classroom practice.

This paper will also describe guidelines for program customization and the balance between prescriptiveness and adaptation (Brown & Duguid, 1996) as local teams tailor and enhance the global model to enact locally-appropriate designs.

Significance
In most of the settings in which it is enacted, 21CLD represents a research-based design for modeling and promoting innovative teaching practices that is substantively different from the professional learning opportunities available to most teachers. Program outcomes will be described in the other papers in this session.

Authors

• Ann House, SRI International

• Linda F. Shear, SRI International

• Gucci Estrella-Trinidad, SRI International

• Deepa Patel