‘The Times They are a-changin’

In 1964, Bob Dylan released his song, “The Times They are a-changin,’” amid social and political strife within and out of our country. Young people were rising in the streets over civil rights, Vietnam and social injustice.

Today, our students aren’t marching in the streets for the greater good. They’re watching movies on cellphones, Snap Chatting selfies, and, as my 10-year-old son has done, jail-breaking iPads to get into the file system and change the character skin on their Minecraft characters.

This is the 21st century and the times, they are a-changin’. Only this time our students have different needs and different social battles to fight. This time the social antagonist is the digital world we live in.

Our digital life has great power, both good and bad, and the skills to leverage it will be the deciding factor. The bad: cyberbullying, cybercrime, identity theft, sexting. The good: jobs, communication, vast information and knowledge at our fingertips.

Digital literacy today is not only a right, but an essential skill to live safely and prosperously. Our superintendent of schools, Deena Paramo, understands this. In her current letter to the public on the school district home page she references a 2014 Gallop research project that finds that “Students are less engaged the longer they stay in our school system” and that “change is inevitable.”

She notes that “content is free” and quotes Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner, via forbes.com: “Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially.”

What she is talking about is that not only has the world changed — the jobs, the way we live digitally, the way we communicate and entertain ourselves — but so has the way we learn.

Simply put: students learn differently today.

Students learn differently today because the world around them has evolved. Students will need 21st century skills to get by successfully. They will need to know how to use technology effectively, responsibility, and morally.

So our classrooms must also change.

While the job market will always need skilled laborers, a greater number of jobs will need high-tech skills and digital literacy. Some of our best and most experienced teachers must teach to kids who will take jobs in fields that didn’t exist when they were in school. “Web developer” wasn’t even in our vocabulary 30 years ago.

In the next 10 years there will be a serious shortage of computer programmers. In the next 10 years there will also be a whole slew of jobs that don’t even exist today.

Schools are working hard to keep up with more and more requirements, more content, more skills. To do this effectively, schools need 21st century classrooms and teachers who can teach in them.

This year, Superintendent Paramo pledged to upgrade two classrooms with Innovative Classroom Grants of $25,000 each to create the “model 21st century classroom.” These are classrooms that, when a visitor walks by and looks in, they would see dynamic and innovative learning going on.

A 21st century classroom is not one with just more “tech” in it. It is not about merely plunking $25,000 down on new computers and iPads and a few specialty-use gizmos and gadgets — all of which will be outdated in a few years. It is about creating an innovative learning space using technology — both simple and fantastic — that caters to multiple modalities of learning and higher-order thinking skills. It is a classroom that is modular, reconfigurable, fluid, comfortable and usable in many ways. It is a classroom that invites collaboration, creativity and innovation.

Soon, Palmer High School math and science teacher Mikey Evans and Knik Elementary’s fifth-grade teacher Kathryn Guinotte will show off their new classrooms as the two $25,000-grant winners.

The 21st century classroom makes the best use of technology, like Evans’ science classroom. He will integrate six full-spectrum digital lab stations using a “Forced Concept Inventory” learning approach. (Didn’t I say we’re living and learning in a changed world?)

The 21st century classroom also uses low-tech solutions like Guinotte’s innovative classroom design. She will use modular furniture, lighting, and walls covered with whiteboard material to make forever reconfigurable learning spaces. Kids will literally be able to write all over the walls as they visualize their lessons working in groups around the room.

In the 50 years since Dylan wrote his anthem for the 1960s, times, they have a-changed. Kids aren’t fighting in the streets for social change like they once did or standing up against the establishment purely on principle. They are fighting a more silent battle and are for the most part, unaware of it. They are entering a world that is so different from their parents’. It is a world that needs a different skill-set than their parents’. Their battle is to be prepared for their future like no other generation has had to do, a future that will change faster than we can teach it.

And it is the schools’ job to prepare our children to be the next “changers” of the world.

So as our world continues a-changin’ at a faster and faster pace, schools will struggle to keep up. It is only with visionary leadership, smart investment, and teachers willing to change with the times that we will properly prepare our children for the jobs of tomorrow — some of which don’t even exist today.

Read more about Evans’ and Ginotte’s innovative classroom grants at bit.ly/1A8tAnI.

Brian Mead is a Digital Media, Drama and Journalism teacher at Colony High. He applied for the Innovative Classroom Grant but didn’t get it. Maybe it’s because he already has an innovative classroom with two computer labs, a TV studio, and audio studio.