I just checked out this website: 21st Century Skills. I found it very interesting as a teacher to think about everything we are unable to teach as a result of the high stakes test taking environment that education is these days. As a teach more, as I read more, and as I think more about what it is my students really need these days I increasingly waver on the importance of content. Before I go any further I would like to say that we need to figure out a base line of content that all students need to have and be able to operate with. However, with the availability to information ever increasing from libraries, to bookshelves, to school computers, to home computers, to laptops, to smart phones... our students CONSTANTLY have access to information. What is more important these days is educating our students on how to access the RIGHT information to answer their questions or how to solve their own problems using that information.
I think that the p21.org website really starts to address these concerns and realities. The job market has become less and less of a specialization based process and more of an adaptability process. More and more jobs are not looking for the specialization of your college degree but rather looking at how you work in a group, how you adapt to difficult or challenging situations etc. These skills are fast becoming more important to gaining and maintaining a job.
By taking the existing curriculum and modifying it to include the following things a lot of positive things could happen in schools.
• Global Awareness
• Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy
• Civic Literacy
• Health Literacy
• Environmental Literacy
• Creativity and Innovation
• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Communication and Collaboration
• Information Literacy
• Media Literacy
• ICT (Information, Communications and Technology) Literacy
• Flexibility and Adaptability
• Initiative and Self-Direction
• Social and Cross-Cultural Skills
• Productivity and Accountability
• Leadership and Responsibility
I believe these last one are the most important for always being ready for any challenge the world has to offer.
All and all, I am a very young and optimistic teacher. However, I can imagine that by the time this curriculum gets implemented it will be changed, modified and watered down to the point of being pointless. Right now the process is happening top down which is good in many regards. It will make it so the teachers will be provided curriculum to work with, time to incorporate it and support under which to do this. However, I feel this will minimize the potential impact this idea of 21st century skills can have in our classrooms. I think our classrooms really need to be updated (yeah with materials and technology but more so) with the way we approach curriculum and standards.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree with your comment about curriculum. Our students do need a baseline of content knowledge but with information growing at an expotential rate, how do districts determine the baseline? Our focus has to be on how to teach students how to find and use information appropriately.
ReplyDeleteWhat I found most exciting about the website was the list of five 21st century themes. At first I found them overwhelming from an elementary perspective. But if districts used these themes when reorganizing curriculum, positive things could happen in school and students would develop literacies important for life beyond school.
I also agree with your comment about students needing to know a baseline of information. With information and technology changing on a daily basis, we have to focus on effective ways of retrieving information. Each job is going to be looking for something different in their workers and we as teachers can only provide the basic tools for a student to be successful later in life.
ReplyDeleteThe baseline of information our students need to know is supposed to be our standards. However, we all know that some states have more relaxed standards than others. We also know that there is a lot of repetition in our standards instead of scaffolding because there are so many standards taught each year that students don't really come away from a year of school having mastered many standards. More, they get exposed to standards. This exposure method of teaching makes it impossible to compare U.S. schools with countries that focus on their students mastering just a few standards each year. If we didn't have so many standards to cover then we might be able to integrate technology into those standards in a more meaningful way if the technology standards have also been separated into standards for each grade level. Then we might be able to focus on teaching students how to retrieve reliable information.
ReplyDeleteI have a friend in Arkansas also getting her Masters in Educational Technology and some of her peers try to cite sources from Wikipedia and pass it off as scholarly. When adults don't know how to retrieve reliable information, how can we expect our students to?