Self-directed student learning begins with self-directed educators. Teachers in Greenville, North Carolina, are training in the Habits of Mind, a series of thinking behaviors that support self-directed learning by helping students successfully tackle complex problems. The authors outline key instructional strategies that have grown from these…

To prepare students for a tech-intensive future, educators cannot hold on to 20th-century learning practices. They must reimagine education and cultivate an updated skill set. Lessons led by caring educators will continue to help students be strong learners and critical thinkers; but "human" skills will equip them to handle an uncertain…

Using the Teach to Lead process and drawing on their own study of how teachers can lift their social-emotional skills, three elementary teachers in Connecticut created a plan to work with fellow teachers to increase everyone's camaraderie and regularly problem solve together. When their school closed to in-place learning, they pivoted to find ways…

At the root of problem solving, Tishman and Clapp assert, is a sense of agency. The impetus to engage with a problem starts with a sense that it's possible to reshape something by directing one's actions purposefully. The authors--who participated in a long-term project observing how the "maker movement" is being implemented in…

You read in the paper this morning that people who take multivitamins have fewer heart attacks and are less likely to get cancer than people who don't. Does this information make you more likely to want to take multivitamins? To truly prepare students for life, schools need to teach them the critical thinking skills they need to answer questions…

In some math classrooms, students are taught to follow and memorize procedures to arrive at the correct solution to problems. In this article, author Mike Flynn suggests a way to move beyond answer-getting to true problem solving. He describes an instructional approach called three-act tasks in which students solve an engaging math problem in…

Teachers have a lot of frustrating things to deal with in school--obdurate administrators, inane work rules, and ham-fisted policies, to name a few. Instead of speaking up for change, many teachers have just come to accept all the dysfunction and take refuge in their classrooms. But teachers have it in their power to bust out of that classroom…

Since 2002, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has been the leading advocacy organization in the United States focused on infusing 21st century skills into education. Its "Framework for 21st Century Learning," the result of a consensus among hundreds of stakeholders, describes the skills, knowledge, and expertise students need to…

The skills that students need for the 21st century are not really new, assert Rotherham and Willingham. Critical thinking, problem solving, information literacy, and global awareness have been important to human progress throughout history, at least among the elites in different societies. What is new is the extent to which individual and…

Although professional learning communities have gained wide acceptance as a way for teachers to support one another's learning, there is less attention paid to the need for principals to meet together to enhance learning and leadership. Three years ago Sterrett (an elementary school principal) and Haas (a high school principal in the same…

New technology-enabled assessments offer the potential to understand more than just whether a student answered a test question right or wrong. Using multiple forms of media that enable both visual and graphical representations, these assessments present complex, multistep problems for students to solve and collect detailed information about an…

Describes an assessment center that not only identifies strong candidates for administrative positions but also helps participants improve weak skills. (Author/JM)

A structural arithmetic curriculum is designed to help students develop their own powers of thought. (Author/MLF)

Bethpage Union Free School District in New York is a high-performing district by almost any current accountability measure. Yet administrators and teachers worried that they were not doing enough to prepare their students as critical thinkers for the 21st century. Inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the…

Research in cognitive science is providing an increasingly detailed understanding of human cognition. Teachers can help students become conscious of their own reasoning processes and then learn to compare, contrast, interrelate, or coordinate various ways in which they think in order to refine their problem-solving methods. (Author/MLF)