21st century educators
What knowledge do 21st Century educators need?
Here are three frameworks for thinking about how educators combine their knowledge of technology for learning with content knowledge and their understanding of pedagogy and methodology. We use these frameworks to plan professional learning opportunities
Anatomy of 21st Century Educators
This framework describes the six roles 21st Century teachers fulfill.
ISTE Standards for Educators
This framework is designed as a competency framework and if you go to the site, you can click on each standard to see the indicators for achieving the competency.
TPACK - Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge
This framework presents a Venn diagram of how 21st Century teachers use knowledge from different domains to achieve competency.
Anatomy of 21st Century Educators
Changing the "what, where, when, how" to "from whom," "to whom" and "with whom."
- Simon Bates, King's College London Excellence in Teaching Conference, 2014
from here: extend.ecampusontario.ca/home-3
new site: extend.ecampusontario.ca
This framework is described as an anatomy--a study of the structure or internal workings of blended teaching. It is an exploration of the roles that 21st Century teachers fulfill in relation to the use of digital technology for teaching and learning. It is a description of what teachers ARE doing rather than a prescriptive list of what teachers SHOULD do.
The eCampus Ontario Extend professional development program has created a module for each part of the anatomy. AlphaPlus also finds the Anatomy useful when thinking about and planning professional support for the instructors we work with.
An understanding of how students learn and how to design effective learning activities and experiences.
Sharing and enhancing one's own educational approaches through collaborations within, across and between disciplines.
A producer and consumer of appropriate educational resources through sharing and development.
An awareness and appreciation of effective, research-based, discipline appropriate pedagogical approaches.
Fluency using learning technology in educationally effective ways.
An openness to try, reflect, and learn from new approaches, pedagogy and technologies to support student learning.
Click titles for PD modules.
ISTE Standards for Educators
International Society for Technology in Education
These standards will deepen your practice, promote collaboration with peers, challenge you to rethink traditional approaches and prepare students to drive their own learning.
www.iste.org/standards/for-educators
This framework uses the term standards which can seem more prescriptive than the anatomy but there are parallels between the ISTE standards and the Anatomy. At AlphaPlus we read this as descriptive rather than prescriptive because our experience is that the instructors we work with to implement blended learning are doing these things.
Empowered Professional
1. Learner
Educators continually improve their practice by learning from and with others and exploring proven and promising practices that leverage technology to improve student learning.
2. Leader
Educators seek out opportunities for leadership to support student empowerment and success and to improve teaching and learning.
3. Citizen
Educators inspire students to positively contribute to and responsibly participate in the digital world.
Go to the site to see how educators fulfill these roles.
Learning Catalyst
4. Collaborator
Educators dedicate time to collaborate with both colleagues and students to improve practice, discover and share resources and ideas, and solve problems.
5. Designer
Educators design authentic, learner-driven activities and environments that recognize and accommodate learner variability.
6. Facilitator
Educators facilitate learning with technology to support student achievement of the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students.
7. Analyst
Educators understand and use data to drive their instruction and support students in achieving their learning goals.
TPACK
Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge
...attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge.
matt-koehler.com/tpack2/tpack-explained
This framework acknowledges the complexity of planning and implementing blended learning approaches.
Pedagogical Knowledge (PK)
Teachers’ deep knowledge about the processes and practices or methods of teaching and learning. They encompass, among other things, overall educational purposes, values, and aims. This generic form of knowledge applies to understanding how people learn, how to activate adult learning principles in curriculum and lesson planning and how to support assessment.
Content Knowledge (CK)
Teachers’ knowledge about the subject matter to be learned or taught. In adult literacy programs, in some cases instructors adopt a learn-with approach and explore topics with learners. In other cases, there is a body of knowledge that learners need to acquire and understand in order to meet a goal or desire or to take the next step towards a goal and instructors need to have a strong understanding of that body of knowledge.
Technology Knowledge (TK)
This is the domain that changes the most and is the hardest to define. It is a teacher's knowledge about certain ways of thinking about, and working with technology tools and resources. It includes understanding information technology broadly enough to apply it productively, being able to recognize when information technology can assist or impede the achievement of a goal, and being able continually adapt to changes in information technology.
Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)
PCK covers the core business of teaching. This is where the teacher transforms the subject matter into content for learning by interpreting the subject matter, finding multiple ways to represent it, forging connections among different content-based ideas, and adapting and tailoring the instructional materials to alternative conceptions and learners’ prior knowledge. An awareness of alternative teaching strategies and the flexibility that comes from exploring alternative ways of looking at the same idea or problem are essential for effective teaching.
Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK)
This a teacher's understanding of how teaching and learning can change when particular technologies are used in particular ways. This includes knowing the pedagogical affordances and constraints of a range of technological tools as they relate to pedagogical designs and strategies. TPK becomes particularly important because most popular software programs (the Microsoft Office Suite for example) are not designed for educational purposes and web-based technologies such as blogs, podcasts and social media are designed for entertainment, communication, and social networking.
Teachers apply their TPK to reject functional fixedness, look beyond most common uses for technologies, and reconfigure them for customized pedagogical purposes. TPK is a forward-looking, creative, and open-minded seeking of technology use, not for its own sake but for the sake of advancing learning and understanding.
Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK)
This is an emergent form of knowledge. TPACK is different from knowledge of all three concepts individually; it is an understanding that emerges from interactions among content, pedagogy, and technology knowledge.
TPACK integrates
an understanding of how to represent concepts using technologies;
pedagogical techniques that use technologies in constructive ways to teach content;
knowledge of what makes concepts difficult or easy to learn and how technology can help redress some of the difficulties that learners face;
knowledge of learners’ prior knowledge; and
knowledge of how technologies can be used to build on prior knowledge to develop or strengthen understanding.
