CCR and South Africa’s NECT announce partnership

Posted on August 28, 2018 by Charles

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) and South Africa’s National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT) announced a partnership to develop 21st Century learning models and practices.

EdHub is the innovation unit within the NECT with an explicit mandate to promote and support innovation in education. It aims to coordinate innovation for 21^st Century education so that it can impact, at scale, the public basic education system in South Africa and ultimately improve education outcomes and quality of life for all.

A recently initiated channel within the EdHub is the establishment of the “21^st Century Schools Sandbox” initiative that intends to set up a laboratory for 21^st Century schooling models in the public sector, where various innovative models for teaching and learning can be trialed. Through the implementation of this project, a body of evidence will be gathered to assist in proving the case for the integration of 21^st Century teaching and learning practices into the South African public schooling system.

Godwin Khosa, CEO of the NECT, stated, “The CCR/NECT Partnership is ambitious yet practical, as we are playing in the transformation and not the improvement space. But we will keep focused on trialing and testing while feeding key findings into the basic education sector throughout the process.”

Charles Fadel, founder of CCR, added, “We are delighted to advise and assist the NECT with its EdHub/Sandbox initiatives to serve as a model for South African schools. The attachment to 21^st Century Competencies of Skills, Character, and Meta-Learning is both refreshing and leading edge.”

The NECT is an organization dedicated to strengthening partnerships between government, business, labor and civil society to achieve South Africa’s national goals for basic education. It strives both to support and influence the agenda to reform education through a variety of capacity-building interventions, monitoring and evaluation, research, and advocacy. With cross-sectoral governance spanning government, business, labor & civil society, the NECT is uniquely positioned to identify, enable and fast-track change in the basic education system.

CCR is a non-profit global organization dedicated to improving Education and openly propagating its recommendations and frameworks on a worldwide basis, via answering this question: “What should students learn for the 21^st Century?” CCR brings together international organizations, jurisdictions, academic institutions, corporations, and non-profit organizations including foundations. It focuses on designing and propagating new curricula and assessments.

@CurrRedesign @The_NECT #4DEdu

CCR and SOMOS Eduçao announce partnership

Posted on August 21, 2018 by Charles

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) announced a partnership with Somos Educação, the largest basic education group in Latin America, for the development of 21^st century competencies in its curriculum – which reaches over 30 million students in Brazil.

The Brazilian Ministry of Education recently released the country´s first mandatory curriculum, the “BNCC.” According to Renato Nunes Dias, head of Curriculum and Assessment at Somos, “the partnership with CCR will result in the delivery of a free platform for schools and teachers nationwide, offering them the tools to build their curricula, transforming 21^st century competencies into daily practice.”

Leticia Lyle, head of Somos Institute, said, “This opportunity to give back to our country is unique in our history. We are proud and pleased to be developing deep competencies of knowledge, skills and character and their mapping to the BNCC, including the embedding into disciplines such as Mathematics, Language, etc. Our partnership with the CCR, coupled with our innovative digital platform, are allowing us to develop curricula deeper and faster than at any time before, and make the BNCC vision a reality in the classrooms.”

Charles Fadel, founder of CCR, added, “In Somos, CCR has found a leading-edge, open-minded and progressive partner that understands that our four-dimensional (“4-D”) framework, available in 16 languages including Portuguese, is versatile and adaptable as well as detailed and actionable. We are delighted to be helping the BNCC and Somos comprehensively assist teachers and students to learn at their fullest.”

Both organizations expect that by September 2018 they will introduce the first instances of the free curriculum on the platform to test with teachers and students.

@CurrRedesign #4DEdu

CCR and ACARA announce design of world-leading K-12 Mathematics curriculum

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Charles

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) has partnered with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) to design a world-class mathematics curriculum for K-12 schools that explicitly addresses the learning needs of students for life and work in the 21^st century.

CCR is leading math experts and practitioners from Australia, the U.S., and around the world to develop an exemplar world-class mathematics curriculum that any country could use to inform their own curriculum design. This is particularly timely as the OECD has embarked on deepening its Mathematics PISA 2021 assessment.

“This is a world first,” said Charles Fadel, founder of CCR. “We are taking the Australian Curriculum in Mathematics as a starting point because our international analysis shows it is already one of the best curricula worldwide. And we are now applying learnings from recent innovations in curriculum design and professional practice to ensure we modernize the content of mathematics, while also bringing in concepts, interdisciplinary learning and competencies (skills, character, meta-learning).”

“ACARA is pleased to be working with the CCR on this ground-breaking project,” said Robert Randall, CEO of ACARA. “We have a mandate to assemble evidence for reviewing, designing, and refining the Australian Curriculum. This joint project with the CCR will be used to inform any future refinement of the existing Australian Curriculum in Mathematics and to help guide improvements to ACARA’s overall curriculum design and development process.”

Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s Education and Skills directorate, stated, “PISA 2021 will incorporate several new features: more focus on essential and relevant subjects and topics such as exponentials, emphasis on modern branches such as statistics/probabilities, and explicit attention to 21^st-century competencies such as reasoning, computational thinking, and resilience. I commend the CCR, our partner in Mathematics for the past 5 years, for leading this endeavor with a world-leading authority such as ACARA”.

The project draws on evidence collected and agreed on as part of the PISA Mathematics 2021 project, which CCR advised, including conferences in 2013 in Stockholm and in 2018 in Geneva. “It is now internationally recognized that the school curriculum needs to allow more time for deeper learning of discipline-specific content and 21st century competencies. In order to do that we need to selectively curate (add, emphasize, de-emphasize, or remove) curriculum content so that the core concepts and essential content are focused on that will best prepare students for life and work in our changing world,” said Charles Fadel.

@CurrRedesign #4DEd

“Knowledge for the Age of Artificial Intelligence” – CCR publishes landmark report and Knowledge framework

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Charles

The media world is suddenly awash with news about Artificial Intelligence, but CCR has been working on its impact – and that of many other global factors – and consequences for Education, for a decade. This work had led in 2016 to the publication of its recommendations for a Four-Dimensional Education framework (“4D”) described its book.

After 18 months of further research, CCR is delighted to offer its expanded Knowledge framework (+ appendix), describing how to rethink content in the age of algorithms (from search to A.I.) to build:

Relevance and personalization (for learner motivation)
Versatility (robustness to future uncertainties)
Transfer (actionability in real-world situations, leading to “flipping the curriculum“)

All of which are to be achieved via a deep redesign of disciplines and their content:

Modernizing/curating traditional disciplines (STEM, Humanities, Arts), via analysis of:
- Essential Content
- Core Concepts
- Learning progressions
Adding Modern Disciplines (Technology & Engineering; Media (digital journalism, cinema); Entrepreneurship & business; Personal finance; Wellness (physical, mental); Social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, civics, future studies, etc.).
Developing Interdisciplinarity and Themes (Environmental, Global, Civic, Information and Digital Literacies; Systems, Design and Computational Thinking; etc.)
Intersecting with Competencies, the other three dimensions of the framework: (Skills, Character, Meta-Learning).

We remain as committed as ever to answering our seminal founding question “What should students learn for the 21st century?” in an age of AI and more… join us!

“Personalized Learning” Released by CCR

Posted on May 2, 2017 by Charles

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) is pleased to publish its synthetic and concise report, Personalized Learning: The State of the Field and Future Directions, clarifying the confusions over terminology and structure and including its recommendations for progress.

The vision of a highly-personalized learning experience in education is a long-standing “Holy Grail” advocated for by educators for many decades. The report quotes renowned inventor Danny Hillis (of Thinking Machines and Google Knowledge Graph fame), “ …consider what kind of automated tutor could be created using today’s best technology. First, imagine that this tutor program can get to know you over a long period of time. Like a good teacher, it knows what you already understand and what you are ready to learn. It also knows what types of explanations are most meaningful to you. It knows your learning style: whether you prefer pictures or stories, examples or abstractions. Imagine that this tutor has access to a database containing all the world’s knowledge. This database is organized according to concepts and ways of understanding them. It contains specific knowledge about how the concepts relate, who believes them and why, and what they are useful for. I will call this database the knowledge web, to distinguish it from the database of linked documents that is the World Wide Web.”

The report highlights concrete steps needed to make this vision a reality, which starts with “a reference framework [like CCR’s] for aligning learning experiences, resources, assessment and reporting to the competencies” (iNACOL).