In her discussion of the teacher as meddler in the middle, Erica McWilliams identifies three sets of 21st Century Skills:
* academic functional
* aesthetic digital
* dynamic interactive
She suggests that intellectual clout is needed in this work for the teacher to become ‘usefully ignorant’ as the meddler in the middle. We must be pedadgogical experts but not knowledge experts. The 21st century classroom will need to be:
* Seriously playful
* Epistemologically agile
* Low threat high challenge
Erica explores the skill set of the meddler and her fascination with design, disassembly and rediscovery. She illustrates her point with the story of her as a young child cutting up a tennis ball to find the bounce in(side) the ball.
The meddler’s classrom is:
Respect rich
Structure rich
Conversation rich
Information rich
Challenge rich
This envoronment is more than going digital. What would you consider the kinds of assessment procedures required to support wide and deep learning? The kind of work produced as a folio of such work will be:
Deep, wide and transdisciplinary
Move from known to unknown
Unfolding as a series of responses to wondering
A tightly edited document of a learning journey that exhibits distilled sufficiency
Demonstrating growing complexity of thought and skills of editorship
Amenable to evaluation
The learner is able to discuss this portfolio and the teach as meddler is a co-learner. This approach has clear pedagogical intention and significant affordances. The classroom is in design mode: what is the idea good for; what does it do and fail to do; does it have a future; how could it be improved; what is the value add?
The design classroom is characterised by:
Knowledge more than facts
Deeply understand what is being built upon
Immersion
Social processes
Going past the labels to the activities
In the design mode disassassembly creates space for thinking. It welcomes error, strategy, instructive complication, and interesting ideas.
Meddlers accept and create space for co-designing and are clear about looking for ideas and when error is welcomed.
The classroom celebrates wonder, imagination, and steps outside held views.
