OVERVIEW

THINKING-BASED LEARNING AS THE CORNERSTONE OF 21ST CENTURY CLASSROOMS

INSTRUCTIONAL AND ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES FOR THINKING-BASED LEARNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY CLASSROOM

The February Seminar will take place in Newton, Massachusetts, USA. It will be taught as a graduate level seminar.

DETAILS

THEME: THINKING-BASED LEARNING AS THE CORNERSTONE OF 21ST CENTURY CLASSROOMS

The 2012 February Seminar on TBL will focus on two major issues as schools change their focus worldwide to skills and competency-based curricula from information oriented curricula. We will work on the best way to organize TBL for it to be its most effective in these classrooms, and on how classroom teachers can integrate new assessment techniques into their classroom assessment program so that it is TBL based.

Critical and creative thinking, communication, and cooperation are the three skill areas most prioritized as schools worldwide think about how they will respond to the changes and challenges that students in the 21st Century face. But often the first of these is the least articulated, and very little is developed in these new curricula as to how students will be taught CCT skills. In our experience TBL is the answer to these questions, and we have accumulated evidence from hundreds of classrooms that support this.

Two important questions we must ask ourselves, then are 1) how can this best be communicated to educators working with new 21st century approaches to education, and 2) what is the connection between TBL and the skills and competencies needed to become excellent communicators and fine team thinkers? In our experience TBL is a powerful way to help students develop skills and competencies at reading, writing, speaking, and listening – if not the most powerful instructional approach. The same can be said of the social and teamwork skills needed to work well with others in TBL programs. The second theme of the two seminars is, therefore, how we can articulate the foundational connection between TBL and competency in communication and cooperation clearly and how it can serve as the basis for the effective classroom assessment of students’ progress in learning and thinking?

SEMINAR DESCRIPTION

This seminar will first explore in depth the instructional techniques that make TBL work so well in school and college classrooms. We will define the role of TBL in 21st Century classrooms and articulate its role in the skill and competency building needed for good effective communication and collaboration. We will then focus on the kinds of changes necessary in the way that student work is assessed to provide classroom teachers with reliable information about the level of skill used by students in their thinking in addition to their content understanding. We will look at the most recent models of assessment that move away from true/false and multiple-choice assessment to more extended and open-ended response assessment. We will also explore how that can be comfortably integrated by teachers into the regular assessment procedures in the classroom.

Enrollment is limited and applicants will be considered on a first-come-first served basis. Teachers and other educational professionals with some experience in teaching thinking are especially encouraged to attend this seminar.