Project Management for Education ― The Bridge to 21st Century Learning

This unique book is for two audiences! Read one way it is for educators; flip it over and read the other way it is for project managers! These days, everybody seems to be talking about “21st century skills” and how our students need new ways of learning if they hope to succeed in life. In recent years, changes in how work is done have rapidly shifted society’s demands. What today’s students need to succeed in their future work, family, and civic lives is dramatically different from what previous generations learned in school. But what are 21st century skills and how can educators bring them to students? The easiest answer is: by turning to the processes and principles that the field of project management has been utilizing for decades—skills such as critical and creative thinking, problem solving, effective communication, collaboration, self-motivation, persistence, and a lifelong passion for learning. These essential 21st century skills and mindsets, already part of daily life for project management professionals, are exactly what modern students need to learn in order to succeed. Project based learning (PBL), a set of engaging and powerful learning methods organized around motivating projects, is one of the most popular ways to bring the skills used by project management into students’ educational experience, giving them amazing opportunities to develop the essential 21st century competencies they need. In Project Management for Education: The Bridge to 21st Century Learning, authors Bernie Trilling and Walter Ginevri provide a “two-in-one” guide for educators and project management professionals, demonstrating how the two fields can work together. By teaming up to enrich the experience of students, both educators and project management professionals can continue to develop their own skills and better meet the challenges they face in our ever-changing world.

Walter Ginevri helps private and public organizations gain greater value in managing their projects, programs, portfolios and operations. His clients belong to various market sectors including finance, manufacturing, fashion, retail, ICT and European institutions. The foundation of his experience is consulting, training and coaching. He has a passion for helping companies be more efficient through the adoption of a multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural and multimedia project language. He has a passion for helping young and senior project managers be proud of their profession through a “learning, unlearning and re-learning” process. He considers the Project Management Institute as his professional family, thanks to which he had the opportunity of conducting researches on the complexity theory applied to projects. Thanks to the great support of the PMI Educational Foundation, he also had the opportunity of spreading the project language in the schools of my country and all over the world. Bernie Trilling is a 21st century learning expert, advisor, author, and the former global director of the Oracle Education Foundation, where he directed the development of education strategies, partnerships, and services for the Foundation and its ThinkQuest programs. He has served as Board Member of the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21), co-chaired the committee that developed the highly regarded "rainbow" learning framework, and is a P21 and American Leadership Forum Senior Fellow. Bernie has worked on a number of pioneering educational products and services and is an active member of a variety of organizations dedicated to bringing 21st century learning methods to students and teachers across the globe.