Effectiveness of implementation of 21st century pedagogical elements in the
secondary school science teaching and learning

Make it Relevant

Any curriculum must be relevant to student's lives

Irrelevance lead to lack of motivation result of decreased learning

Teachers need to begin with generative topics, ones that have an important place in the disciplinary or interdisciplinary study at hand and resonate with learners and teachers.

Both teachers and students benefit from the use of generative topics and reinforcement of relevance.

Teachers like this method because it allows for the freedom to teach creatively.

Students like it because it makes learning feel more interesting and engaging, and they find that understanding is something they can use, rather than simply possess.

Teach through the disciplines

Focus on knowledge of the discipline and also the skills associated with the production of knowledge within the discipline.

Through disciplinary curriculum and instruction students should learn why the discipline is important, how experts create new knowledge, and how they communicate about it.

Requires that the student or expert become deeply familiar with a knowledge base, how to use that knowledge base, articulate a problem, creatively address the problem, and communicate findings in sophisticated ways.

Simultaneously develop lower and higher order thinking skills

Higher-level thinking tends to be difficult for students because it requires them not only to understand the relationship between different variables (lower-order thinking) but also how to apply—or transfer—that understanding to a new, uncharted context (higher-order thinking).

Transfer tends to be very difficult for most people. However, applying new understandings to a new, uncharted context is also exactly what students need to do to successfully negotiate the demands of the 21st century.

Higher-level thinking skills take time to develop, and teaching them generally requires a tradeoff of breadth for depth.

Encourage transfer of learning

Design learning experiences that are similar to situations where the students might need to apply the knowledge and skills

Set expectations, by telling students that they will need to structure their historical argument homework essay in the same way that they are practicing in class

Talk through solving a particular mathematics problem so that students understand the thinking process they might apply to a similar problem

Ask students to practice debating a topic privately in pairs before holding a large-scale debate in front of the class

Practice finding and using historical evidence from a primary source and then ask students to do the same with a different primary source

Teach students to learn how to learn

Teachers can develop students’ metacognitive capacity by encouraging them to explicitly examine how they think.

Important for students to develop positive mental models about how we learn, the limits of our learning, and indications of failure.

Students benefit from believing that intelligence and capacity increase with effort (known as the “incremental” model of intelligence) and that mistakes and failures are opportunities for self-inquiry and growth

Address misunderstandings directly

To overcome misconceptions, learners of any age need to actively construct new understandings.

Teaching generative topics deeply,

Encouraging students to model concepts

Providing explicit instruction about misunderstandings.

Promote teamwork as a process and outcome

Students learn better with peers.

They can develop arguments and debate them

They can role-play.

Several students work through a given issue, talking through their thinking process while the others comment.

Students can discuss concepts in pairs or groups and share what they understand with the rest of the class.

Make full use of technology to support learning

Technology offers the potential to provide students with new ways to develop their problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills

Web-based forums through which students and their peers from around the world can interact, share, debate, and learn from each other.

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Foster students’ creativity

The cognitive ability to produce novel and valuable ideas

Creativity is prized in the economic, civic, and global spheres because it sparks innovations that can create jobs, address challenges, and motivate social and individual progress.

Creative development requires structure and intentionality from both teachers and students and can be learned through the disciplines.