NOW Classrooms, Grades 9-12. Meg Ormiston
The four Cs, which you can learn more about at www.p21.org, are essential skills all lifelong learners need to be prepared for their future, not just nice-to-have soft skills. These skills are more important than in the past because we are preparing students for a global world of work, one filled with jobs we haven’t identified yet. A comprehensive study by Craig D. Jerald (2009) for the Center for Public Education, titled Defining a 21st Century Education, addresses this shifting world of work and the importance of the 4Cs:
Workplace and corporate change is having a large impact on skill demands. To succeed in ‘flat’ organizations characterized by less supervision and greater individual autonomy, individuals need to be able to act independently to identify opportunities and solve problems on their own. They also will need strong interpersonal skills—written, oral, social—to collaborate effectively with colleagues on self-managed work teams. (p. 15)
From these essential four Cs skills, there are sets of super skills that we believe all students need if they want to succeed in the 21st century (see table I.1).
Table I.1: The Four Cs and Super Skills of the 21st Century
| Four Cs | Super Skills |
| Communication | Sharing thoughts, questions, ideas, and solutions |
| Collaboration | Working together to reach a goal—putting talent, expertise, and smarts to work |
| Critical Thinking | Looking at problems in a new way, linking learning across subjects and disciplines |
| Creativity | Trying new approaches to get things done, which equals innovation and invention |
Source: Partnership for 21st Century Learning, n.d.
We need to develop these super skills in students because too many of them have not experienced any real voice and choice in their classroom learning, meaning that they haven’t been allowed to decide how they present the information they learn. Classrooms that feature student voice and choice look very different from traditional classrooms because the students who exercise voice and choice own their learning path and goals. No matter the content area or class section, students who develop these super skills become independent directors of their own learning, which we believe will set them up for lifelong success outside the classroom. These elements are what transform traditional classrooms into NOW classrooms.
For high school teachers, it’s also important to note that grades 9–12 students often know as much as or more than their teachers do about using technology. This makes it easy to think that students don’t need their teachers to develop their ability to interact with a digital world. We disagree. As Mary Beth Hertz (2012) puts it:
It’s one thing to use a tablet computer and its apps to learn basic literacy skills; but learning to create, read critically, use online content responsibly and be a respectful digital citizen are not always skills that can be learned without the guidance of a teacher.
The role of the teacher carries more importance than ever as we teach our students to become lifelong learners.
Using This Series
This book is part of the five-book NOW Classrooms series, all organized around grade-level-appropriate themes adapted from the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students. The series includes the following five titles.
1. NOW Classrooms, Grades K–2: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
2. NOW Classrooms, Grades 3–5: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
3. NOW Classrooms, Grades 6–8: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
4. NOW Classrooms, Grades 9–12: Lessons for Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
5. NOW Classrooms, Leader’s Guide: Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Technology
Instructional coaches might use all five books in the series for project ideas at all grade levels and for leadership strategies. We scaffolded the lessons across the series of books so they all flow together, and we organized all the grade-level books in this series in the same way to make it easy for all readers to see how the ideas link together. We believe this series will save you hours of preparation time.
Using This Book
This book features a series of lessons written for grades 9–12 teachers. As teachers, we know how challenging it is to come up with fresh ideas for the classroom each day, so we wrote our lessons in a way that makes getting started simple. That said, instructional coaches and administrators can also use the book’s lessons to support the students and teachers they lead.
Each of the chapters includes multiple topical sections, each with three lesson levels—(1) novice, (2) operational, and (3) wow, spelling NOW. Once we arrived at the three levels, it felt almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure book instead of a step-by-step recipe book. Make your lesson selections based on what your students can already do. For example, in chapter 4, we introduce the topic Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Data (page 101). The novice lesson in this section covers how students can use forms to create polls and surveys to gather data on a topic they study. But maybe your students already know how to do that, or maybe you have specific students who are ready for an increased challenge. You can advance those students to the operational lesson, which involves them taking data they collect and understanding how to analyze the data to find meaning. Students who have mastered both concepts are ready to showcase their learning for a broader audience, hence the wow lesson on publishing and presenting data.
Each lesson begins with a learning goal, phrased as an I can statement, written in student-friendly language. These statements help students understand the learning goal and make the learning experience purposeful. When students more clearly understand what they can do and where they are going, learning happens. This is important because it means that students are taking ownership of their learning. We then explain to you what students will learn from the lesson and the tools you can use to make it work, and we provide a stepped process you can follow to accomplish the learning goal. All lessons wrap up with subject-area connections that feature ideas you can use to adapt the lessons to different content areas, like English language arts, mathematics, and science.
A unique addition to this book is the addition of a career and technical education (CTE) connection for every lesson. In this category, we include all types of CTE courses, such as agricultural education, entrepreneurship, culinary arts, web design, and many more. As you read through the CTE connections, you may find classes your school does not offer, but because many schools are starting to partner with local community colleges to create dual-credit courses, we include connections for all types of classes. In some districts or regions, there are career centers offering a wide range of classes, and we also want to make sure these teachers and students have lessons that apply to their content areas.
Along the way, we also provide teaching and tech tips in this book’s scholar’s margins to provide useful insights. Finally, we have included discussion questions at the end of each chapter so you can use this book with your team for professional development.
Chapter 1, “Embracing Creativity,” has you teach students to create multimedia products, rather than just consume them. Using the lessons in this chapter, you can help students develop their ability to creatively