21st Century Learning and Teaching

Higher-level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades. We learned about it in college. We hear about it in PD. We’re even evaluated on whether we’re cultivating it in our classrooms

In an educational setting, curation has a ton of potential as an academic task. Sure, we’re used to assigning research projects, where students have to gather resources, pull out information, and synthesize that information into a cohesive piece of informational or argumentative writing. This kind of work is challenging and important, and it should remain as a core assignment throughout school, but how often do we make the collection of resources itself a stand-alone assignment?

That’s what I’m proposing we do. Curation projects have the potential to put our students to work at three different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy:

• Understand, where we exemplify and classify information
• Analyze, where we distinguish relevant from irrelevant information and organize it in a way that makes sense
• Evaluate, where we judge the quality of an item based on a set of criteria

If we go beyond Bloom’s and consider the Framework for 21st Century Learning put out by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, we’ll see that critical thinking is one of the 4C’s listed as an essential skill for students in the modern age (along with communication, creativity, and collaboration) and a well-designed curation project requires a ton of critical thinking.

Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/learn-every-day-a-bit-with-curation/

https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/curation-tips-and-tricks-with-scoop-it-rescoop-and-tags/