The changing skills required for success in the 21st century has fueled the continued focus away from a teaching paradigm and toward a learning paradigm. The challenge is closing the gap between what we would like to do as educators based on what we value and what we actually do based on our existing educational infrastructures.
We have all learned an enormous number of things over the course of our lifetimes to date, and it never ends. We somehow learned how to talk, eat, walk and eventually how to think…even about thinking. There have been countless lessons that we have learned, sometimes with the help of deliberate teaching, and sometimes not. How do all of these miracles of learning occur? If we could somehow better understand how this independent learning happens, perhaps it could help us develop new and innovative ways to help students learn? Are there barriers built into our educational systems that actually inhibit this natural learning process, for some students, for all students?
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Albert Einstein
In this section, you will find three learning models that support these goals we share as educators, along with practical teaching and learning strategies associated with each model: