1. 21st
Century Education Narrative
For the 21st
century education project I was partnered up with Michael
Fields and we were assigned the critical thinking pillar. Michael and I started by
giving the dictionary definition of critical thinking and then the same definition,
but in our own words. We then went on to explain the importance of critical
thinking in the classroom. Then, we described how critical thinking applies to 21st
century education. It is important to apply critical thinking in education because of
the immense amount of false information that is produced on the Internet. Students
need to be able to critically think in order to decipher what information is accurate
and which information is false. After describing how critical thinking could be
applied, a video was shown about how teachers feel about critical thinking in the
classroom. They described how the implement critical thinking in the classroom
and why it is important to them. For our example of application we used the
question “Is the Constitution a living document?” We used this particular example
because Michael’s specialty is history and he would be able to explain the answer
to this question with ease. We described that is important to build upon our prior
knowledge in order to arrive at an answer to the question at hand. Upon discussing
our questions, Harold pointed out that we needed to go much deeper with the
arrival to our answer. He pointed out that critical thinking is like walking down a
hallway and opening a door only to find that there are 5 more doors that can be
opened. I like the way Harold described this because it gave me a clear mental
image of how critical thinking should be executed. For our role of technology, we
chose to use WebQuest. A WebQuest gives students a task that requires students to
research the provided information to arrive at a solution or answer to the situation
or problem given at the beginning of the quest. After we explained critical thinking
to the best of our ability, we presented our works cited page and then were done
with out presentation.