21st-Century Skills Are Not a New Education Trend but Could Be a Fad
In public education today, "21st-century skills" are all the rage. Educators, business leaders, and elected officials are united around the idea that there are new skills students must have to be successful in today's economy.
But while it is exciting to think we live in times so revolutionary that they demand entirely new skills, that assumption and others threaten to establish a false choice between teaching facts and teaching how to approach them—and to make the 21st-century skills movement another fad leading to little change in American education.
Schools, the 21st-century skills argument goes, focus too much on teaching content at the expense of essential new skills such as communication and collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving, and concepts like media literacy and global awareness.
The American job market is changing, of course, and the nation does need more highly skilled workers than in the past. While plenty of low-skill jobs remain, most of the fastest-growing and highest-earning jobs do require more education and training. There are also obviously some discrete new skills that students need because of advances in technology. But, overall, none of these skills are unique to the 21st century.
Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been a component of human progress throughout history, from early tools and agricultural advancements to gunpowder, vaccinations, or exploration. And while "global awareness" has historically been as much a martial talent as an economic one, interconnectedness is not new nor is information literacy among elites. Likewise, the idea that there is a hierarchy of knowledge from facts to complex analysis is not a new one. Plato, for example, wrote about four distinct levels of intellect. Perhaps these were considered "3rd-century B.C. skills"?
What's new today is the degree to which economic competitiveness and educational equity mean these skills can no longer be the province of the few. This distinction is not a mere debating point. It has important implications for how schools approach teaching, curriculum, and content.
While students should leave school with more than just facts in their head, facts do matter, too. Content undergirds critical thinking, analysis, and broader information literacy skills. To critically analyze various documents requires engagement with content and a framework within which to place the information. It's impossible, for instance, to critically analyze the American Revolution without understanding the facts and context surrounding that event. Unfortunately, state, national, and international assessments show that despite a two-decade-long focus on standards, American schools still are not delivering a content-rich curriculum for all students.
And shared content also binds us as a nation, providing a pathway to opportunity. As University of Virginia English Prof. E. D. Hirsch has tirelessly argued for more than two decades, giving all students a common framework of knowledge is a key strategy for increasing civic equality.
Unfortunately some 21st-century skills proponents believe these skills should replace the teaching of content. They believe that because so much new knowledge is being created, students should focus on how to know instead of knowing. This view threatens to reopen a debate in American education that is not new either: content pitted against critical thinking rather than the two complementing each other.
There are also real technical and logistical challenges the movement must overcome. Outside of intensive writing assignments, measuring many of these skills in a large scale or standardized way is difficult. As my colleague Elena Silva described in a recent analysis it is possible to design assessments that test both content and skills like critical thinking or problem solving. But unless these measurements are carefully designed, students can fake knowledge on many exercises intended to measure skills, again shortchanging content. In any case, most states are ill-equipped to implement such assessments today and too many teachers are not prepared to use them or teach this way today.
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We Need to Do Things Differently, Not Just Do Different Things
Recently The Partnership for 21st Century Skills defended its approach to educational reform by explaining, in essence, that the process was long, slow, and hard. While it may take years “to fully impact standards, assessments, and professional development,” the students now in middle and high school don’t have years to wait while we get all our ducks in a row. Lives are at stake. Are we going to write these kids off and wait to make sure that we can assess our rescue tactics before we rescue the next generation? Or can we exercise some 21st century skills to bring about rapid and effective change while developing the measures needed for long term sustainability?
If we attempt to do different things without changing how we go about them, we will end up where we always do when it comes to educational reform. What could be accomplished if, instead of long, slow, hard and too complicated for anyone but professionals, we embraced the very attitudes and behaviors that are the foundation for the critical skills we seek to teach, and took on the “can do” spirit of innovators, critical thinkers and problem-solvers to craft a solution that is easy, fast and effective? Successful implementation of educational reforms can occur rapidly when the need is urgent and the opportunity serves the interests of those on whom it depends for success. Isn’t this the essence of collaboration, problem-solving, and innovation?
Likewise, students can learn and develop these skills rapidly and effectively when they have a reason to. Since 2004, EntrepreneursNOW, a Connecticut non-profit, has proven repeatedly that lasting change can be brought about quickly when students are engaged in learning experiences that are relevant to them with adults who model the behaviors, attitudes and skills being taught. It took weeks, not years, for this group of committed entrepreneurs, business people and educators to develop a program that causes profound behavioral and attitudinal changes in youngsters. In only nine-weeks, randomly-assigned teams of students launch real money-generating businesses, and in the process become innovative, collaborative problem-solvers able to develop and effectively communicate their ideas and move themselves and others into action to fulfill on a common goal. Fast, easy, effective, and very 21st century.
To transform the educational experience we need to “be” the transformation. When we walk the walk, not just talk the talk, students have no trouble learning these important skills from us.
The Case for 21st Century Skills
Andy Rotherham sets forth a number of valid points here. I would make the case, however, for promotion of 21st century skills for two reasons. The first is that there is a need for a specific skill set for students and workers in the digital age. The second is that in the absence of a conceptual framework for the instruction and assessment of those skills, they will never be given the credibility and attention necessary for their implementation.
While higher-order thinking skills have been crucial to survival and advancement since the dawn of time, specific iterations of those skills as related to technological, economic, cultural and political contexts are equally as critical. Technology now gives us the historically unique circumstance of being able to immediately access a wealth of content and to communicate, collaborate, and create with breath-taking speed. The need for our students to use these resources constructively, appropriately and effectively requires us to be deliberate about the teaching of critical skills that are not often recognized (and are even more rarely taught) in schools today.
If, as Mike Schmoker has emphasized, "What gets measured gets done," then what we "get done" most in public education is to prepare our students to choose the best answer out of 4. A world in which colleges, corporations, countries and citizens must all be adaptive and innovative demands more. As noted, measurement of these skills is neither easy nor cheap - but if we want to see that the teaching and learning of these skills gets done, we will have to measure them. Technology gives us new opportunities to teach, practice and assess these skills, but in order to do so, there has to be buy-in and implementation at all levels, and, most importantly, in the classroom.
That said, educators need compelling reasons to adjust their practice. The tendency of public education to do nothing quite so well as maintain status quo has created the need for the kind of compulsory change exemplified by NCLB. In the absence of a clear, understandable picture of the future, along with relevant instructional goals and practices, many teachers have yet to adapt instruction and assessment to the needs of that future. As noted by Ken Kay, we need a coherent framework for design and implementation of relevant instruction and assessment - and "21st Century Skills" is a valid title for that framework.
While there is certainly a danger, as Andy notes, that promotion of 21st century skills might become a "fad," threatening to displace core content, I would argue that these skills are as important for our students as “cultural literacy." The pendulum has swung very hard in the direction of content in recent years, and the movement to promote 21st century skills arises from the recognition that content without skills is as meaningless as skills without content. In order to create the best opportunities for all students, we need to provide them with both.
21st Century Skills
Andy Rotherham uncovers an important concern about the re-introduction of critical thinking and other "21st Century Skills" into the education dialogue. Will U.S schools get serious about helping all kids develop these skills, or will it be just another American fad for the affluent?. We are notorious for such fads.
That these skills need to be reintroduced into daily instruction for all students should not be a question. Or do those who raise the question not know what has been going on in schools, especially schools filled with students with low income because of NCLB's minimalism? How many of the defenders of "knowing the facts" really understand how the current administration's educational policy and practice, reinforced with big dollars to the big publishing/testing corporations, have attempted to squeeze anything but measureable, memorizable facts out of the curriculum. Not so? Check with your children. Go visit an urban classroom. Where have essay exams with thought provoking questions as the norm gone? Why are there more 'circle the right answer" worksheets more prevalent? Why has the number of short answer tests come to dominate how teachers determine what students know not only in crowded city classrooms, but also in most low-class size suburban schools.
The issue here is not that students shouldn't know the facts. It is how they are forced to learn them, even in AP classes where memory becomes the be-all and end all day in and day out, rather than a start down the pathway of understanding, of questioning and of learning how to use information.
In the late nineties, strong research identified those teaching strategies that have the highest impact on student achievement. Among these were asking questions, cooperative learing, hypoothesis testing, summarizing and comparing. These are not what visitors will see in most classrooms. What visitors will see in an increasing number of classrooms is teachers forced to read instructions from scripts that focus on covering facts, facts and more facts with little on no understanding by the students. Instead of worrying about a false war between facts and thinking, it might be more appropriate for the fact-lovers to do a little fact checking about what is really happening in classrooms.
If the business community, through its partnership, has finally discovered that students coming to the workplace lack both content knowledge and complex thinking skills and wants to push the education community and politicians to catch up to the rest of the world, that is all for the good. Perhaps, by reviving interest for 21st Century Skills, the partnership can establish the inclusion of these skills with deeper and richer content that will be a trend, not another fad for every child in every school.
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