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ICL Standards

Kim Cofino is the 21st Century Learning Specialist at the International School of Bangkok. She recently posted the standards/outcomes of 21st-century literacy and technology for the school. I shared at her site that they are very clear and easily understandable for the school community to process and then act upon. As change agents, one of our main tasks is to explain why we need to make changes. Well-written and sometimes obvious explanations to us ICL leaders could be more apparent to the community. The ISB team did an excellent job.

The next step is to communicate the new ICL outcomes to the community. This will involve buy-in and involvement by the administrators and real support from the teachers. This education phase, first for teachers, then for students and parents, is crucial. They then become supporters as your innovator teachers try new instructional strategies and assessments that lead their students to the ICL understandings.

As I look around the Web at international school sites, I find more and more mention of “21st Century Skills”, “information literacy,” and “technology skills” in mission statements and skill sets for potential hires. Having sat in committee meetings, wordsmithing statements with all the buzzwords, I can say that we often leave out the essential steps of communicating and then creating the mechanisms to move us into action mode. The way to move 21st-century ICL skills into the classroom is through the curriculum development process.

This becomes much easier after the communication has taken place and community members understand the value of good design in presentations, the importance of reflection in all aspects of student learning but especially in their information sources, the place of bias in information coming in and going out, etc. Again, check out the list the ISB team put together or see the HKIS ICL Standards & Benchmarks.

One thing to note about the HKIS ICL standards is that they are the same as the school’s academic student learning results. This makes sense in that shouldn’t the skills for 21st-century learning naturally be what all our teachers are building a portion of their lessons around? Much of our teaching involves skills, and we want to teach about ones in the present century, correct?

On a side note, Kim has a very interesting job title. Looking back at my previous posts on job titles, I like the one she is using. However, as I just mentioned, ICL standards should be a part of the school’s student learning outcomes. Is there a need to designate a learning support teacher working towards those outcomes with “21st century” or “technologist” as part of the job title? 

Well, as I concluded in my post, we need to use those terms for the time being until ICL becomes integrated into a school’s learning systems. One day, folks like Kim and I might just be called “learning specialists/coaches” collaborating to design a differentiated curriculum focused on reaching the school’s academic student learning outcomes, which naturally contain the ICL outcomes.

2 Comments

  1. David,

    I think the key – even more than the well written statements and clear communication – is the buy in and value placed on these skills by the admin and staff. It’s all well and good to have the statements made (and I’m so glad that we’ve been working on ours here at ISB), but it’s only the first step. The much harder part is helping teachers come to the realization that these things are essential to schooling in the 21st century. I’ll keep you posted on how we make out here at ISB 🙂

    Kim

  2. lessonslearned

    January 9, 2008 at 10:50 pm

    Boy howdy, you said it Kim. That “human” part of the change equation is the most important and the most difficult as you point out. It is great to see moving beyond the words to action. I do look forward to observing through your blog posts how you and your team of ICL leaders shifts your school along.

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