Literacy Is Still Not Enough: Modern Fluencies for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

Modern fluencies provide a platform for authentic teaching, learning, and assessment

While reading, writing, and arithmetic remain important, they are no longer enough. Learners must move beyond traditional literacies to modern fluencies—the unconscious mental processes that are learned, adapted, and applied in real-world problems and challenges. The authors unpack six core fluencies to better reflect social, cultural, and economic shifts of modern times. Practical resources are presented alongside

·         Fluency Unit Plan Exemplars

·         Assessment rubric examples

·         Discussion questions

Dr. Nicky Mohan is a global citizen by choice. Born and raised in South Africa, she now shares her time between New Zealand and Canada. Nicky has been a classroom teacher, a school administrator, a university leader, a business sector manager, a co-operate trainer, an international speaker, and a global consultant and acknowledged expert in the field of instructional design. Dr. Mohan also worked as the Director of Curriculum for the 21st Century Fluency Group (Canada). She is currently the Managing Partner of the InfoSavvy Group (Canada), and Director and co-founder of SpringBoard21 (USA), international educational consulting firms. Nicky has co-written five books including the award-winning Reinventing Learning for the Always-on Generation; and is a member of the Teacher Task Force - UNESCO core working group on 'The Role of AI in Education'. To contact her and get to know more about her work and her team, follow @nickymohan on Twitter, visit their websites - https: //infosavvy21.com/ and https: //www.springboard21.com/ and subscribe to their YouTube channel https: //www.youtube.com/c/TheCommittedSardines.

Ian Jukes has been a teacher, an administrator, writer, consultant, university instructor, and keynote speaker. He is the director of the InfoSavvy Group, an international consulting group that provides leadership and program development in the areas of assessment and evaluation, strategic alignment, curriculum design and publication, professional development, planning, change management, hardware and software acquisition, information services, customized research, media services, and online training as well as conference keynotes and workshop presentations. Over the past 10 years, Jukes has worked with clients in more than 40 countries and made more than 7,000 presentations, typically speaking to between 300,000 and 350,000 people a year. His Committed Sardine Blog is read by more than 78,000 people in 75 countries.

Ryan Schaaf is the Assistant Professor of Educational Technology at Notre Dame of Maryland University, and a faculty associate for the Johns Hopkins University School of Education Graduate Program, with over 15 years in the education field. Before higher education, Ryan was a 3^rd-grade public school teacher, instructional leader, curriculum designer, and a technology integration specialist in Howard County, Maryland. In 2007, he was nominated for Howard county and Maryland Teacher of the Year.

In the past, Ryan has published several research articles in the New Horizons for Learning and the Canadian Journal of Action Research related to the use of digital games as an effective instructional strategy in the classroom.

Currently, he is overseeing and constructing peer-reviewed K-12 lesson units for the 21^st Fluency Project, where he is also a featured contributor for the renowned Committed Sardine blog. He enjoys presenting sessions and keynotes about the potential for gaming in the classroom, the characteristics of 21^st-century learning, and emerging technologies and trends in education.

Ryan is happily married to his beautiful wife Rachel and has two little boys that are his pride and joy. In his free time he enjoys fishing, exercising, gardening, and volunteering in local schools.