Skill First, Content Second

This is me with another dear friend, Pat Chiarella (and that's Dave eating in background...). Pat teaches geography. Kids love her to pieces. She's one of the best teachers I know, but it has nothing to do with her popularity.



Without question, Pat knows her stuff. Any question of a geographic nature, she can handle it with information that is current and precise. I've had the fortune of being in her class a number of times while she's been teaching and it never ceases to amaze how ahead of the times she has always been.

I think, in all the research and reading that I have done on the subject, that if there is one thing I can emphasize as critical for 21st century teaching is the importance of teaching SKILL, not content. In this day and age, knowledge is no longer static, especially in disciplines like the social sciences. We need to impart our students with a skill set that will do them well in a multitude of subject areas so that they can deal with the ever-changing nature of knowledge and knowledge construction. That's why my friend Pat inspired this posting. At the centre of what she does is the skill - whether is mapping, graphing, note-taking or reading (yes, she is a geography teacher and she teaches reading in her subject area...), the content is never the star of the show. The beauty thing about this approach is that those kids are more likely to remember the skill more than the content when they take history the following year, and that's just fine because they'll be successful in their ability to learn the content through the invaluable skills they acquired the year before. I'm not saying that content no longer matters to 21st century learners, because it still does. Teachers are called to use their professional judgement, in conjunction with the Ministry documents to decide what content is truly essential to meet the overall expectations of a given course. In doing so, we stop teaching courses, and the focus turns to teaching students.

Maybe one day, this will be reflected in our curriculum documents. I mean, the newly revised Arts document is on its way to being THE quintessential 21st century document. The strands were re-named and re-ordered and Creating and Presentation is now the first strand in all of the areas of Arts. It's a small but significant change. It places the construction of demonstration of new knowledge literally at the forefront of every course of study, which means that the acquisition of a specific skill set is crucial. If this was done in every discipline, Ontario would be on its way to catching up with the times, and Pat's geography class. For now, I can be content with this being done one document at a time.