January-February 2010 (Digital Edition)
21st Century Math and Science: Making it Real

The Twenty-First-Century Skills movement has received much attention in recent years, with both supporters and critics weighing in. How can we best prepare children for the world of the future? How do we help them to become lifelong learners? Is there any difference between twenty-first-century teaching and what progressive educators have been advocating for centuries?

In this issue are examples of fine teaching for this century. Some teacher-authors take their guidance from a specific framework incorporating the kinds of skills and patterns of mind that experts say will best prepare today's students for jobs, citizenship, and meaningful life in the coming decades. Some simply teach in ways they believe are best suited to foster a joy of learning, both for today and throughout life. Their methods use active, challenging, compelling, and supportive techniques that incorporate immediate and local concerns as well as global issues.

Regardless of whether their teaching is linked to a specific set of strategies named for this century, or follows a set of best practices, the educators writing in this issue engage their students in meaningful ways, making math, science and technology real.

November-December 2009
Data & Probability

Each day we encounter many phenomena that can be tracked, recorded, and analyzed. Data are often needed to make informed decisions, plan collaborative projects, and address individual and community needs or problems. In our teaching of how to collect and use this information, valuable math and science concepts can be embedded in student's experiences. At the same time, we can unite what would otherwise be considered separate disciplines.

When we offer students the opportunity to practice gathering data, we are helping them to develop skills that will benefit them both now and in the future. Going further, their work with probability helps them to understand what is impossible, what is likely, and what can be expected.

This issue of Connect features articles that highlight students using data to advance their own learning about the world around them. In many of these stories students observe their environment, ask questions, share results, and plan next steps in a process of inquiry that is itself a skill. Whether getting to know each other, the behaviors of crayfish, or the history of labor unions, these students are putting data and probability to work, engaging in both high quality learning and active participation in the classroom and their communities.