Top 10 Ideas for a 21st Century Classroom * Experience

1. Pull, don't push.  Draw out questions and help students translate that into insight and understanding.  Education is not about the transmission of knowledge, it's about empowering each student to reconcile a question he or she is facing--and can't help but seek out an answer.
2. Create from relevance.  This has always been the case -- capture their attention and imagination.  Engage kids in ways that have relevance to them and discuss them, or, better yet, work to address them, instead of relying on explanation alone.
3. Stop calling them "soft" skills.  Talents such as creativity, collaboration, communication, empathy, and adaptability are not just nice to have; they're the core capabilities of a 21st-century global economy facing complex challenges.
4. Allow for variation.  Permit mass customization, both in the system and the classroom.  Too often, equality in education is treated as sameness; the truth is that everyone is starting from a different place and going to a different place.
5. No more sage on stage.  Engaged learning can't always happen in neat rows and so must engage the learner using multiple modes.  Everyone needs to feel, experience, and build.  In this interactive environment, the role of the teacher is transformed from the expert to a kind of enabling coach.  Teachers step away from the front of the room and find a place to engage with their learners as a "guide on the side".
6. Teachers are designers.  Let them create.  Build an environment where teachers are actively engaged in learning by doing.  Shift the conversation from prescriptive rules to permissive guidance.
7. Build a learning community.  Learning doesn't happen in the child's mind alone.  It happens through the social interactions with other kids and teachers, parents, the community, and the world at large.  Schools must find new ways to engage parents and build local and national partnerships.  This doesn't just benefit the child--it brings new resources and knowledge to the entire enterprise.
8. Be an anthropologist, not an archaeologist.  An archaeologist seeks to understand the past by investigating its relics and digging for the truth of what was.  An anthropologist studies people to understand their values, needs, and desires.  In order to design new solutions for the future, we must understand what people care about and design for that.
9. Incubate the future.  What if our K-12 schools took on the big challenges that we're facing today?  Through topics like global warming, transportation, waste management, health care, poverty, and even education, children may see their role in creating this world through examination and creating solutions.  It's not about finding the right answer, it's about being in a place where we learn ambition, involvement, responsibility, not to mention science, math, and literature.
10. Change the discourse.  If you want to drive new behavior, you have to measure new things.  Skills such as creativity and collaboration can't be measured on a bubble chart.  We need to create new assessments that help us understand and talk about the developmental progress of 21st century skills.  This is not just about measuring outcomes, but also measuring process.  We need formative assessments that are just as important as numeric ones.  And here's the trick:  we can't just have the measures - - we actually have to value them.

 * From IDEO's Top 10 Ideas for a 21st Century Classroom