Becoming.

Raphael, The School of Athens, 1511

A solution only makes sense once you understand what the problem is. The more I travel, the more I’m convinced that most educators simply don’t understand the true problem we face. The challenge is that, for the !rst time in our history, we’re expected to prepare all students to have high skill levels. And unfortunately, as it operates today, our system either can’t or won’t do that.

Far too many students leave before they complete high school. Even if they do graduate, many of them graduate learning disabled, learning delayed, or learning deficient. What’s more, many students today are increasingly disengaged. There’s a huge and growing issue of disconnect between what these students learn in school, what’s available for them outside of schools, and what they need to succeed in life beyond school.

The problem we have as teachers is that, in a lot of respects, our digital learners are leaving us behind. We need to catch up, and to do this we need to become smarter teachers. But the question is, how? What can we do to bridge the gap between us and our future leaders?

In our attempts to fix things in education, we constantly focus on the symptoms, not the causes,of problems. That’s why we see people looking for packaged answers, rather than looking at the root causes and doing what needs to be done to change the system. Sometimes we seek complex solutions for what are truly simple problems.

With this in mind, what follows are my observations about some simple things we can do to change that. Let’s take a look at 15 different steps you can take to becoming a smarter teacher.

Read the rest at 21st Century Fluency Project.