Teaching 21st Century Skills
Integrated Instructional Approach to Content and Critical Thinking
Mar 24, 2009
During his first 100 days, President Obama hit the ground running with three key priorities: the economy, healthcare, and education. In the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act’s hyper-focus on testing, educators, parents and students need a reason to be hopeful, and the new administration promises an education that will help students to acquire the 21st century skills needed to compete in an increasingly global economy.
In a March 10th address to the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama proposed a new vision for 21st century education by “calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.” What does a 21st century education mean, in practical terms?
What are 21st Century Skills?
The term “21st century skills” implies a new, modern approach toward educational instruction and a new set of competencies. However, the skills included in a 21st century education are in evidence in high-performing classrooms across the world. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the leading advocacy organization for infusing 21st century skills into education, has developed a framework that includes four key elements for 21st century skills:
- Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes: core subjects like math, English-language arts, science, history, arts and government are essential to student learning. In addition to these basics, teachers must also integrate global awareness; financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy; civic literacy; and health literacy. In light of the current economic crisis, financial literacy skills are more important than ever, and have been, for the most part, overlooked as part of traditional classroom instruction.
- Learning and Innovation Skills: work environments are becoming progressively more complex, requiring creativity, critical thinking, and effective communication. Attributes like collaboration, teamwork, and multi-tasking are rarely innate and are best retained when taught as real-life skills during core subject instruction.
- Information, Media, and Technology Skills: in a global economy, workers’ use of technology is multi-faceted and requires a range of critical thinking skills. Technology is changing with increasing speed, and yet, schools have been slow to keep pace. Funding provided to states through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) offers schools an unprecedented opportunity to upgrade classrooms with current technology.
- Life and Career Skills: the modern workplace requires far more than just content knowledge – workers must be able to adapt to varied work environments, responsibilities, and changing priorities. They must also be able to work both independently and as part of a team, to prioritize, plan and manage their own work (often remotely), and to seamlessly “code-switch” when working with colleagues of other cultures.
An Integrated Instructional Approach
In years past, competencies like life and career skills were relegated to home economics classes, but the work world of today requires an entirely new set of skills. Given these increasing expectations, how can teachers be expected to fit it all in? Educators and policymakers at the highest levels of the education field advocate for an integrated approach – one that infuses core subject areas with 21st century skill instruction. Still, without more attention to teacher training and more time in the school day for instruction, American schools may continue to be left behind.
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