Remember when all educators could talk about were MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)? While they’re still around and useful for the modern classroom, new educational trends and vernacular have entered common parlance in efforts to make curriculums and philosophies sound appealing, stealing some MOOC thunder.
Before you start trying to integrate every great new idea Google throws your way, remember that buzzwords must be carefully defined if used by you and your fellow administrators. Otherwise, you risk compromising your projects due to proverbial crossed wires. This month, we’ve collected some of the most popular buzzwords that educators can expect to hear in the coming school year—along with their actual definitions given by leading experts.
1. Blended Learning
What people might think it is: Curriculums that combine various subjects and traditional teaching methods.
What it actually is:
[...] A way to customize education to an individual student’s learning type and an instructor’s personal teaching style, by offering a variety of options from which both students and teachers can choose.
—ISM’s interview with blended learning expert Mark Engstrom
2. Project Based Learning, or PBL
What people might think it is: Legos teach physics. Teachers should never lecture, because lectures are boring!
What it actually is:
PBL is the act of learning through identifying a real-world problem and developing its solution. Kids show what they learn as they journey through the unit, not just at the end.
—Heather Wolpert-Gawron for Edutopia
3. STEM (“Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math”)
What people might think it is: Computer programming. (Or, stem-cell research.)
What it actually is:
Educationally, we imagine STEM instruction as creating the next innovators, the superstars. We look for highly proficient students and try to increase their interest in these fields so that we develop the innovators of the future. Our goal is to get them through high school prepared for rigorous college coursework so they can become the leaders of tomorrow’s industry. Educationally we see STEM as a very specialized, high-tech field we are grooming our students to join. Industry, on the other hand, has a very unique view.
STEM from the workforce perspective is significantly different and more about grooming workers with 21st-century skills who are ready to jump right in. When teachers think about technology, we envision computers, touchscreens, and digital data-collection tools. This view differs from how technology was considered when STEM was first being discussed. Technology in industry is about thinking outside the box and using materials to solve problems. I was once told that scissors were a form of technology, and for industrial purposes, they really are. They were created to solve a problem: how to cut something more precisely. Problem-solving and developing quick and cost-effective solutions on the go are what industry is seeking in the next-generation workforce.
—Jonathan Gerlach for the National Science Teachers Association)
4. Makerspace
What people might think it is: An area for students to fiddle with blocks and scribble on walls to “enhance learning.”
What it actually is:
A makerspace is a place where students can gather to create, invent, tinker, explore and discover using a variety of tools and materials.
A makerspace can be anything from a repurposed bookcart filled with arts and crafts supplies to a table in a corner set out with LEGOs to a full blown fab lab with 3D printers, laser cutters, and hand tools. No two school makerspaces are exactly alike, nor should they be. Makerspaces are as unique as the school cultures they represent. There is no such thing as one form of making being more valid or better than the other. Makers are artists, crafters, knitters, seamstresses, builders, programmers, engineers, hackers, painters, woodworkers, tinkerers, inventors, bakers, graphic designers and more.
—Diana Rendina for Renovated Learning
5. “Grit”
What people may think it is: The gravel on the side of the road you pick out of your teeth after a bike ride. Or, perhaps determination, as in “gritting your teeth as you smile at an obnoxious relative.”
What it actually is:
This particular buzzword is especially nebulous. For Scientific American, it means:
[...] skills such as self-control, perseverance and conscientiousness.
For teachers who are asked to teach this in classrooms, they seem to believe that “grit” is as simple as a “new catchphrase/buzzword for resiliency," and as complicated as asking students to have “grit” to overcome “testing fatigue,” with the danger that “they believe the problem can be solved with just more perseverance, overlooking that the problem is systemic.”
6. Inquiry-Based Learning, or IBL
What people may think it is: Teaching students to ask “Why?” in the classroom.
What it actually is: Teaching students to ask “Why?” AND “How?” in the classroom.
… Well, perhaps it’s a bit more complicated:
Teachers build toward student-driven inquiry throughout the course of the unit. Starting with teacher-guided inquiry, teachers model how to develop questions over a series of lessons, showing students that there are multiple ways to solve problems. This prepares students to lead their own inquiry by the end of the unit.
[...] Educators are building a culture of inquiry, empowering students to ask questions like:
- How do I problem solve through this?
- How do I persevere?
- How do I understand the cause-and-effect relationships that occur in every field?
—Ralston Elementary School for Edutopia
7. 21st Century Education
What people may think it is: A 20th century way to refer to modern blended learning initiatives.
What it actually means:
[21st century education] is about the present. While there are undoubtedly major discoveries ahead, the difference maker, adaptive technology, has already happened and is evidenced in the connections that students are making now in ways that we had not imagined possible. As a leader, look around and see what is happening right in front of us.
—ISM in Ideas & Perspectives Vol. 36 No. 13
Did we miss one of your favorite buzzwords? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter!
Additional ISM resources:
The Source for Private School News Vol. 15 No. 2 Blended Learning in Private Schools: An Interview with Mark Engstrom
The Source for Private School News Vol. 15 No. 2 Four Studies on Digital Learning You Need to Read
The Source for Academic Leadership Vol. 12 No. 6 20 Free Online Resources for School Administrators
The Source for Private School News Vol. 13 No. 10 School Spotlight: St. Margaret's Lives its Mission Through edX MOOCs
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 36 No. 13 The 21st Century School: 10 Myths
I&P Vol. 36 No. 14 The 21st Century Academic Administrator and Teaching
