21st Century Skills Development Through Fun and Effective Inquiry-Based Learning

Abstract

The speakers will share some core ideas in their new book titled “21st Century Skills Development Through Inquiry-Based Learning: From Theory toSamChu Book Practice”. The book brings together three of the most important contemporary topics in educational research. Within each of these topics, the book works at integrating across frameworks for a range of standards, as well as varying inquiry-oriented pedagogies. The book reviews the definitions of twenty-first century skills, considers what different frameworks have been established as contemporary guiding educational tenets, and integrates the intersections among frameworks, and aligns them in the three very different national educational contexts of Hong Kong, Switzerland, and the United States. A key theme that runs through the book is the ambitious teaching and learning practices that are integral to inquiry-based learning environments. These are ambitious for teachers in that they will need to be prepared to adapt to the directions that learners take in their inquiry. These are ambitious for learners, as much is expected of them, as they become active agents with heavy responsibility for their own learning. Inquiry-based learning environments are ambitious in the type of new approaches to instructional design and assessment that are needed. The challenges are considerable as they are at variance with teachers’ learning histories and the current generation of students’ learning experiences. It requires a high level of technology, information literacy, and media literacy that are twenty-first century skills for teachers along with the students they teach. The book provides both a vital starting point for educators to question and to come to know our own perspectives on learning, our own frames of reference, our own assumptions and beliefs about learning, and then to advance our pedagogy through the rich elaboration of the approaches provided in the book.