What do teachers really need in the 21st century to educate a child?

One thing that has struck a resonant chord with me is that teachers need in-depth knowledge of how to plan lessons. While NIE gives us templates and highlights the need for stirring activities and gives us a sense of progression in our lesson, teachers have never been trained to teach for understanding - the focus and structures shared are always with a content bias. This served us well in the past but will no longer hold credence in a world where we are inundated with information and the need to make sense and meaning of it has become critical - it is now about teaching for understanding. No amount of education in the different pedagogical approaches will sufficiently equip our teachers with the ability to teach for understanding.

One would think it natural for teachers to teach for understanding, but even our CRPP studies have highlighted the high focus on content dissemination. Wiggins and McTighe noted that there was a Worldwide trend among educators who struggled to come up with essential questions that would lead to students attaining enduring understanding. Often educators get caught up in the operations of things and focus on the minutae. We need to spend more time to think through what exactly we want students to learn and why, so that we can design approaches, questions and assessments that will help students achieve a depth of understanding and teachers are able to track their level of progress. Understanding by design is an ideal curriculum design framework that can be paired with all sorts of pedagogies to fulfill our goals for 21st century education! The planning and questions crafted will help teachers be more adept facilitators of information to bring students into a discussion on a variety of issues. In order for thought to be activated in the classroom Wiggins and McTighe advocate 5 ways to do this:
1. Posing problems
2. Share discrepancies and get students to reconcile them
3. Have puzzles for students to solve
4. Ask open ended questions from different perspectives
5. Provide a variety of challenges to students in the classroom such that they need to think of solutions

This would need planning in scaffolding, in ensuring wait time as teachers often are impatient for quick answers. It is noted by many of the speakers in the conference that teaching for understanding is almost the opposite of teaching for acquisition (content).

In the past, schools could focus on drilling and achieve results. This will slowly fade away as exam formats change. The predictability of the questions and the type of answers required will vary from year to year, so the emphasis of mastery of content will be reduced and a greater emphasis on teaching for understanding will be required. We need to take a quick leaflet from Marzano's research on how people learn, and note that while we are good with the stage 1 of acquisition, there is lots of room for improvement in the areas of making meaning and transfer of learning. All 3 elements will make for a comprehensive 21st century approach to T&L.

Therefore the questions we need to ask are:
1. What must NIE do to their present teachers' education programme to prepare us for the 21st century?
2. How can school's have structures that better incentivize desired teaching behavior?
3. What will the roles of the STS,MTS,HODS,SHS and even CPDD officers be in education such that there is an integrated approach, that removes "turf wars" and ensures that maximum learning and benefit is derived for anyone seeking help?

Aziz