21st Century Pedagogy and VET

The 21st Centrury pedagogy is needed in VET to ensure that the learners are responsive, creative, critical-thinkers and have entrepreneurial qualities.  As an institute we should reflect on how we can plan our teachings so that the learner is confident to set their own journey to learn and more importantly have the learners become individuals who know how to learn. If our learners are to survive in this every changing world, we must equip our learners with not only the technological skills but ensure they are developed to meet the requirements of our 21st century workforce of adaptability and transference of skills, thinkers not followers, empowerers of their own learning.

On reflection of my personal pedagogy in alignment with VET pedagogy, I find myself in a place where I thought I had encompassed the use of technology to transform the learning experience.  I do believe I have to a degree, but have found the future learning environments of Twitter, Blogger and Flickr identified by Chris Dede's 2007 report on solutions to meet the 21st century demand are quite new to me. I use Moodle for resource, activities, information building and collaboration, with links to other technology, such as Google+, Answer Garden (brainstorming), wiki was never used to its full potential only as a repository.

When reflecting on Andrew Churches map of the 21st Century Pedagogy, I had to consider what is it I do or could do to ensure my learners emerge into the 21st century with a set of skills that enable them to adapt to the ever changing world they are in.

He discusses the building of technological, information and media influences - an area where I need to consider my personal pedagogy and how I can incorporate this into my current practices.  

When developing thinking skills, I encourage learners to find answers, this is a struggle with NESB as they find it difficult to comprehend what it is we are asking for, I assist with clues, ideas, etc. 

Project based learning has always been preferred, it encompasses many of the techniques used in my facilitating. Learners work in groups to solve problems, continually assessed through both peer feedback and teacher feedback, collaboration with student-to-student and teacher-to-student, contextual learning where information is provided (lower order thinking skills) and students scaffold on this to create/construct their own knowledge (higher order thinking skills).