Learning Design: 21C Skills Framework

Rubric Key Question

Collaboration
Are students required to share responsibility and make substantive
decisions with other people?
Knowledge
construction
Are students required to build knowledge? Is that knowledge
interdisciplinary?
Use of ICT for
learning
Do students use ICT to support knowledge building? Is ICT necessary
to that knowledge building?
Self-regulation
Is the learning activity long-term? Do students plan and assess their
own work?
Skilled
communication
Did the student produce extended communication? Was the
communication well-developed and organized around a thesis?
Real-world
problem-solving
and innovation
Does the learning activity require solving authentic, real-world
problems? Are students solutions implemented in the real world?
Learning Design: Lets Do It
For each 21
st
Century skill, we will:
Learn and discuss common definitions and a rubric
Apply these ideas to sample learning activities how
strong are the opportunities they give students to build
this skill?
Use the rubric to strengthen a learning activity
Look at the relationship between learning activity
design and student work

What does
collaboration mean?
Collaboration
In todays interconnected world, real project work often requires collaboration
across organizations (e.g. a collaboration between a pharmaceutical company
and a chemical engineering company to produce a new vaccine), or with
people in a different part of the world. This type of working requires strong
collaboration skills to work productively on a team and to integrate individual
expertise and ideas into a coherent solution.
Do your learning activities model this today?


This rubric examines whether students are working with others on the
learning activity, and the quality of that collaboration. (Research
rubrics)

At higher levels of the rubric students share responsibility for their work,
and the learning activity is designed in a way that requires students to
make substantive decisions together. These features help students learn
the important collaboration skills of negotiation, conflict resolution,
agreement on what must be done, distribution of tasks, listening to the
ideas of others and integration of ideas into a coherent whole. The
strongest learning activities are designed so that student work is
interdependent, requiring all students to contribute in order for the team
to succeed.

Knowledge
Construction.?
Info and ideas
Solution
What is knowledge work?
Creating
Social Programs
Policies & Laws
Web apps &
Software
Strategies
Design

Knowledge Construction

We often hear the term knowledge. More and more, people are
expected to not only be intelligent consumers of information, but also to
create information and ideas. Students are asked to do the same: to
evaluate, synthesize, analyze and interpret information. We have
overwhelming access to data so we must prepare students to be informed
consumers and smart producers who can integrate information from
multiple sources across multiple disciplines in order to further expand
their learning and make sense of the world.

Do your learning activities model this today?

Knowledge construction activities require students to generate ideas and
understandings that are new to them. Students can do this through
interpretation, analysis, synthesis or evaluation. In stronger activities,
knowledge construction is the main requirement of the learning activity.

The strongest activities require students to apply the knowledge they
constructed in a different context, helping them to deepen their
understanding further, and to connect information and ideas from two or
more academic disciplines (for example, integrating learning from both
science and literature).
Knowledge Construction

Review example learning activities