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Blended Learning

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Literacy Is NOT Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age (The 21st Century Fluency Series)

by Lee Watanabe-Crockett

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Blended Learning said: " Crockett, Jukes and Churches bring together decades of collective experience in education, multimedia and digital tools and make it relevant to modern teachers.

Without pulling any punches, they explain precisely why it is time to unclench our collec Crockett, Jukes and Churches bring together decades of collective experience in education, multimedia and digital tools and make it relevant to modern teachers.

Without pulling any punches, they explain precisely why it is time to unclench our collective hold on the outmoded patterns of thought entrenched in the structures of education since the inception of the current model of public school during the Industrial Revolution, and more firmly encoded at the turn of the century due to the enthusiastic promotion of experts at the time; experts who included individuals like the wonderfully monikered Elwood Cubberley, one of the earliest North American experts on education, who in 1905 wrote confidently, "Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." (Abley, Mark. "Treatment That Might Be Considered Pitiless." Conversations with a Dead Man: The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2013. 65. Print.) Best practice, we now know, says differently. Best practice, woven of research from neurobiology, educational psychology, sociology, and more than 100 years of learning about learning, tells us that the world is changing, tells us that we have done decades of disservice to children. We have the technology to do better, and more importantly, we have the skills and information that will enable us to use the technology and other resources effectively.

Literacy Is Not Enough is one resource of many that can help teachers to effectively recalibrate their way of examining the mass of information and tech tools available to them in their classrooms and in the world around them, without disregarding the tools they already have to hand and the knowledge and skills that they already impart to their students. It does not suggest that literacy as it has been typically taught is not important or unnecessary; rather LINE demonstrates why educators and parents need to work with students to expand on the ways in which older forms of literacy need to be built up and expanded to what the authors term "fluencies". Fluencies, they argue, are a more nuanced understanding and use of skills and knowledge than literacies. and involve less stratification of subject areas and more cross curricular, inquiry based thinking around problems that are both relevant to the "real" world and to students' lives rather than only in limited textbook examples.

The book outlines a set of core "Fluencies" each of which require the basics of literacy and numeracy in order to be mastered, but which are all integrative of more complex thinking skills. Most usefully, and unlike their earlier work, Understanding the Digital Generation, this book offers more concrete tools for teachers to use in order to develop lesson plans, to create formative and summative assessment tools / activities, and tools to evaluate their own lessons and assessment tools.

I have read some reviews that complain that there was still not enough "how" to for them in this book. Perhaps they did not go to the companion website, or did not fill out the worksheets in the book. It's true that Crockett, Churches and Jukes do not provide pre-fab lesson plans, although they do provide several examples for teachers to use as models. In point of fact, they functionally expect that teachers will do the same leg work that teachers expect of their students - to implement the competencies of finding solutions, evaluating their own work on an ongoing basis, sorting and evaluating information and resources to select the best tools and sources for the job at hand, and customizing it for their students, their class and a particular time frame and set of curricular expectations.

There is not doubt that this is a time and effort intensive process. There is also no doubt that as someone who creates materials for other teachers, I have never seen a one-size-truly-fits-all lesson plan. This book provides a tool which, with practice, can be used to create useable, high-quality units and activities that promote a wide range of competencies, skills and knowledge acquisition for students at a wide range of ages, abilities and across a range of subject areas and allows for cross-curricular and project based / inquiry learning.

I would have liked to have seen more guided practice in this book - but then Crockett, Jukes and Churches do not claim to be Wiggins and McTighe, Schnellert and Brownlie, Hume or Nichols. As such, this may be a book best utilized either by those who are confident or eager to start lesson creation from scratch (or at least willing) and/or in Professional Learning Networks / Circles where educators can work collaboratively to support each other through the process. ...more "

Apr 10, 2015 02:09PM · see review