Featured Story

New Learning for a New Century

The world our children live in today and will work in tomorrow is very different from our own. Technology is making the world smaller, more competitive, and highly interactive. Businesses are looking at future opportunities and what skills their employees must possess. Sociologists are considering how all these dynamics will affect they way we live and relate. Schools across the globe are considering ways to make sure our children are prepared to meet these new challenges.

With St. Margaret's tradition of intellectual and social excellence, we are committed to the future success of our students, with graduates who excel in the colleges, careers, and communities of their choice. However, we must continue to look at the evolving requirements for success, the emerging resources for instruction, and the new learning opportunities that are now possible. Essentially, we must consider not just how we have taught in the past, but how we must teach for the future.

21st Century Learning will help us accomplish this goal. Founded on solid research and projections, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills established a framework for learning that we have adapted as appropriate for St. Margaret's. Using this as our guide, we will examine our curriculum, our instructional strategies, our assessments, and even our classrooms to create learning environments that are dynamic and focused on preparing our students for the exciting opportunities that await them.

This fall, we are launching our first 21st Century Learning environment with a redesigned eighth grade US History course and classroom. Our library has established a new level of collaborative efforts to assist teachers with 21st Century Literacy and has created a flexible 21st Century Learning Lab. Our fifth and sixth grade teachers are preparing selected units following a 21st Century Learning approach. School-wide, we continue our work with curriculum mapping using the Understanding by Design model that is the guiding structure for our efforts, and we are adding other professional development components that will prepare and support our teachers as we move forward. We will also continue to offer parent education forums on a variety of important related topics and hope you will attend.

Of course, we are not alone in our efforts. Public and private schools across the nation are making changes in their curriculum and instruction in order to provide appropriate learning within a 21st Century context. Many are participating in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Future of Learning Hubs, where individual classrooms and schools are developing elements of 21st Century Learning as part of a nation-wide research collaborative. Colleges and universities including Harvard and Yale have developed their own plans to evolve their instructional programs over the next five years to better prepare their graduates for their futures outside of school.

We are excited to be part of such an important endeavor, knowing that our students will continue to benefit from a solid program that equips them for lives of learning, leadership, and service well into the 21st Century. This is an amazing time to be a student, parent, and teacher at St. Margaret?s as we engage in exciting new learning for an exciting new century.

To find out more about 21st Century Learning, the research it is based upon, and additional details related to our own plans, we encourage you to contact Tait Lihme to come on campus for a visit.