Rethinking Teaching

Rethink what it means to teach, and reinvent everything about teaching. All of our notions about teaching were developed for eras in which the oral tradition was the main way that knowledge was transmitted from one generation to the next. Libraries existed, but only the very lucky few had access to the kinds of resources that virtually all of us take for granted today. When most any practical question can be answered in microseconds via the network, and in most cases, with a variety of perspectives and viewpoints also included — what is the role of the venerated teacher? What are the defining attributes of the teachers we need to help the next generations build on (or fix) the work we did? What can and should be the key competencies of a teacher? We know we need education overall to be more experiential and more hands-on. We need to be emphasizing good choices, and ethical decisions. Learning must be global, and more based in the realities of the world as it is. It should be more authentic. What we do not know is how to prepare people to be successful with these very different kinds of skills, and that makes this a wicked problem (New Media Consortium, 2013)

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Education is rapidly changing, particularly in the recent technological advances that we have seen in the last 20 years. While the content we teach is still the same, how we teach is going to drastically change. Our group started with some very large questions and from there we narrowed down to one key question: How do educators effectively use assessment in the 21st century? By examining the intersection of traditional assessments with this new technological landscape, a lot of how we think about teaching and learning can be pushed by first examining how we assess.