Carla Williamson oversees the Teach 21 program, an initiative focused on planning and delivering effective 21st century instruction throughout West Virginia. Teach 21's flagship program is its Web site (http://wvde.state.wv.us/teach21), which is a clearinghouse for 21st century instructional resources, including teacher-designed exemplary lessons, units, rubrics, and resources aligned with the state's 21st century content standards.
Williamson, a former high school language arts teacher and former middle and high school principal, also participated in ASCD's high school restructuring consortium in the 1980s and helped open a "high-tech high school" in Charleston, W. Va.
In this interview, Williamson talks about making 21st century instruction a statewide priority.
You've worked with 21st century learning as a focus before; what's different this time around?
There's much more support behind it. When we first started concentrating on 21st century learning explicitly, it was a small group of people in one high school. And now, we're trying to do this with powerful support behind us. We have the governor, the House and Senate education leadership, the state superintendent of schools, and the state board of education all speaking the same language and putting the same emphasis and support behind truly engaging learning that creates problem solvers, critical thinkers, creators, and innovators.
An article in the September–October 2008Harvard Education Letternotes that some 21st century skills have always been around; they've just taken on a different meaning in recent years—do you agree?
Definitely. When I started teaching in 1974, we always talked about our students as critical thinkers and problem solvers, but we never really defined it . . . When you start looking at the 21st century context, the content takes on a whole different meaning.
So you decided to start Teach 21 as a way to flesh out these different meanings?
Yes, but it really started with rewriting our state standards. When we joined the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, we looked closely at our state summative test results and our National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results. Our state summative test results were very high, but our NAEP scores were not that impressive. We realized that our standards and objectives were pretty low level, and they didn't demand the same type of thinking that NAEP required. So we rewrote our standards, looking at NAEP first and foremost, but also the Programme for International Student Assessment, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, ACT, the College Board SAT standards, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards.
We had about 100 teachers working on the standards, looking at four content areas. So we got the alignment and the depth of knowledge we were looking for, and they reflected the 21st century skills content and context. After that, we knew that when we started to talk about the instructional design and the classroom delivery that had to be in place—the triangulation not only of our content standards and objectives but also of learning skills and technology tools objectives, with student performance at the heart of everything we do—we knew we were going to have to show people [how to implement them]. So we came up with [the Teach 21 Web site], and we started working with teachers across the state who could post resources.
How did you identify where to start with professional development on teaching 21st century skills?
We needed to guide teachers' instructional design, so that's where we started. Our teachers just don't have enough time in a prep period to design these sorts of learning experiences. So, we did professional development on backward design, and explained how to write a good, solid academic prompt and how to phrase a culminating assessment. All that came from the work of Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. We had to move teachers away from multiple choice-type assessments and into performances and products. Now we're working with project-based learning (PBL) and getting more units up there, and putting as much professional development online as we can.
Where do you go next?
PBL is a big push for us right now, and we're designing a complete PBL math course for grades 6 and 8, as well as Algebra 1. We want teachers to see that moving from a good, solid, standards-based classroom to PBL is a continuum. We're also adding a new section to the site that will be all about lexile measures in reading (www.lexile.com), and it will have a very strong parent and student component to it—actually connecting to metametrics—where parents and students can use students' lexile scores from standardized tests and measures in the classroom and make summer reading lists, or teachers can make reading lists matched to students' reading levels.
What are Teach 21's "model classrooms"?
We wanted to show people what teaching for 21st century skills looks like, and what better way than to videotape master teachers doing just that? Teachers applied to be a part of the project and submitted lessons that we reviewed, and then we'd send a videographer out to record the lesson in practice. We're about to start a new phase of this project, working with 50 of our best elementary teachers in designing quality standards-based mathematics lessons. Because elementary teachers might not have done a lot of training or received a strong background in math, they're uncomfortable teaching our new math standards, which are pretty rigorous.
What are some of the major challenges to providing a 21st century education?
Time, bandwidth, and our current assessment system. Kids go to school for 180 days a year, and anything in terms of quality, sustained professional growth has to take place outside of that time frame. We need to build time in for these major changes to take place and for teachers to work on improving education.
I believe in the power of our teachers, but that doesn't mean that I think they should have to work without 21st century bandwidth. Our teachers need to be able to connect with teachers all over the world, and we don't have that in every location of this very rural state. That said, teaching 21st century skills is not all about computers.
And assessment needs to be something else in this country—NCLB and even NAEP need to change to support realizing 21st century learning and reflect the depth of knowledge students must demonstrate to be 21st century thinkers.
What drives Teach 21 teachers in spite of these challenges?
Many of our teachers remember when teaching wasn't so textbook driven. The accountability of No Child Left Behind was great because it showed us that we were leaving kids behind, but at the same time, it promoted memorization and learning isolated facts, teaching from the book, getting scores, and making adequate yearly progress, and it started to take the joy out of teaching. Teachers love working with 21st century learning because when they went into teaching, this is what they saw themselves doing with kids. They saw kids in classrooms engaged and enjoying the content as much as they enjoyed teaching it.
