Ed Tech Blog #2

Although this is only my second blog post, I'm really starting to like following the ideas on Twitter and different blogs.  I've been a mostly traditional educator, however, I've been reflecting on the future of education and my resonsibility to lead educators towards understanding and implementing 21st century skills.  A recent blog by Alan Matan made this idea all that much more important.  He wrote about his recent experience at a teacher job fair.  Here is an excerpt from his post:

"I was interviewing potential teaching candidates recently, hoping to get a pulse on undergraduate teacher preparation curriculum. One thing that struck me was the inability for these future teachers to articulate the current discussions in education. I expected these students to talk about the newly adopted CCSS, professional learning communities, common formative assessments, and response to intervention. Or at a minimum have a theoretical foundation in differentiated instruction and formative assessment. I wanted to hear them discuss effective, instructional strategies from Hattie and Marzano. The theme of these interviews was the candidates expressing how energetic and enthusiastic they are. These are great attributes, especially in a new teacher. However, what current skills are they bringing to the profession to help build a 21st century learner?"

Here is link to the entire blog post: http://edge.ascd.org/_Focus-On-These-5-Aspects-In-21st-Century-Teaching/blog/5761291/127586.html

Should I be concerned about this?  Should we all be concerned about this?  Perhaps we all need to work more closely together with college and universities to better define with 21st century educators need to be prepared for.  I'm hoping that our future educators know about PLT's, common formative assessments, RtI, and other "buzzwords" - maybe they were just nervous and forgot to mention them.  I'm also hoping that they understand important 21st century skills, especiall creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration.  Perhaps we should all review the P21 Framework: http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_Framework_Definitions.pdf