Preparing Teacher-Students for Twenty-First-Century Learning Practices (PREP 21): A Framework for Enhancing Collaborative Problem-Solving and Strategic Learning Skills
Source: Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, VOL. 23, NO. 1, 25–41, 2017
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
The purpose of this paper is describe the authors' pedagogical framework for the twenty-first-century learning practices in teacher education.
Methods
For this study, the authors have operationalized the twenty-first-century learning skills particularly (a) from collaborative learning research and (b) from self-regulated learning perspectives.
Collaborative learning
The authors used an approach which represent three sides of collaborative learning: (1) collaborating to learn (collaborative learning environments to trigger productive learning mechanisms); (2) learning to collaborate (collaboration skills as such); and (3) learning to teach by applying collaborative learning approaches.
Conclusions
The authors argue that teacher education has been challenged by the need to enhance the new teachers’ ability to implement new pedagogical approaches and take advantage of ICT for teaching and learning. Since the current way of working in teacher education does not match well enough the needs of twenty-first-century learning environments, such as inquiry-based learning approaches that focus upon collaboration and social forms of learning, as well as the use of ICT. According to the authors' approach, pre-service teachers are educated in a way they are supposed to teach their future students.
The authors say that there is a general notion that education and work have changed, and hence, the challenge is to educate next-generation problem-solvers and communicators. Since one of the main justifications for education is to prepare the students to enter the world equipped to cope with challenging and complex problems, it is also important that the educational systems incorporate the twenty-first-century skills into curricula.
The authors conclude that they have presented a theory-based pedagogical framework for the twenty-first-century learning practices in teacher education that will provide grounding for the empirical phase of their ongoing study.
Next, they will produce empirically tested knowledge on the effects of our framework with the aid of a mixed method research approach.