21st-Century Skills Are Not a New Education Trend but Could Be a Fad
Ken Kay, the president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and one of the most thoughtful proponents of the idea, argues that the challenge today is making schools more deliberate about teaching these skills. While he values content in teaching skills, Kay sees 21st-century skills as the basic "design specifications" for a better school system.
He is certainly right that schools have been haphazard about imparting these skills to students. To the extent most students pick them up it is random, the result of lucky encounters with great teachers, schools, or other influences rather than an intentional curriculum. That must change. But it must change in tandem with a focus on augmenting—not supplanting—content and with a keen eye toward all the constraints that exist in the education system today.
The 21st-century skills movement will be invaluable if it leads to strategies to make our system of schooling more equitable and effective by giving students, especially economically disadvantaged students, both content and various advanced skills. History, though, is not on the movement's side. In American education, the absence of any canon coupled with a tendency to run after every shiny new idea often leads to faddishness that slights the most disadvantaged students.
If they want to genuinely transform teaching and learning, proponents of 21st-century skills must be as deliberate about how their idea is approached and implemented as they want schools to be about teaching these skills.
Andrew J. Rotherham is cofounder and codirector of the think tank Education Sector and writes the blog Eduwonk.com. He is a member of the Virginia Board of Education.
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Reader Comments
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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