Posts Tagged → 21st century skills

Teaching How To Thrive With Chaos

A writer in the Wall Street Journal offers advice for parents about Raising Kids Who Can Thrive Amid Chaos in Their Careers.

Her starting point is the increasingly obvious fact that any sort of “neat, tidy” career path for most of our current students just doesn’t exist.

So what is a parent to do to equip children for this? To ride the job-market surf, workers of the future will need not only the usual technical or professional qualifications, but an additional set of soft, downright squishy skills that experts say must be developed in childhood. A sampling: Adaptability, Exploration, Entrepreneurialism.

Her message is directed at parents but, if the goal of school is to prepare our students for success in the real world, we should also pay attention to the message as well.

After all, none of those skills are assessed on the standardized tests which form the core of our current K12 curriculum.

Even worse, as students progress through most American schools, we actually tend to discourage adaptability, exploration, and entrepreneurialism in favor of creating a uniform, homogeneous product for graduation.

Nothing New in the 21st Century

We’re less than a decade into the 21st century and many people it seems are already tired of “21st century skills”.

I know I’m pretty tired of the phrase being used as an all-purpose cliché by politicians and reformers.

Anyway, that seemed to be the common attitude at a recent panel discussion I would have loved to have attended (hopefully that free link will work).

Much of the debate centered around the work of an advocacy group named the Partnership for 21st Century Skills which is backed by a large group of mostly tech companies with very vested interests.

While I think the Partnership’s basic concepts are valid, I also have to agree with some of the education leaders quoted: this is nothing new.

“We are stuck,” Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, said in an interview. “We’ve been having this curriculum war for years.”

“There is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st-century-skills movement,” said Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University and a co-chairwoman of Common Core, the Washington-based nonprofit group that sponsored the panel discussion. “The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the 20th century.”

However, I find a great deal to disagree with in the thoughts of Mr. Core Knowledge, E.D. Hirsch

As a result, critical-thinking skills cannot transfer from the specific content in which they are exercised to real-life contexts such as in the workplace, said E.D. Hirsch, a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and the founder of the Core Knowledge, a curriculum designed to increase students’ background knowledge.

Students become proficient critical thinkers only by gleaning a broad body of knowledge in multiple content domains, he said.

The P21 idea, Mr. Hirsch asserted, “is that once you acquire [these skills], they are all-purpose muscles. That error is fundamental, and it is fatal.”

Hirsch’s fatal error is that students still need to accumulate and retain a “broad body of knowledge” before moving to the stage where they actually learn to make use of it.

In the age of the ubiquitous web, students don’t need to know who fought at the Battle of Gettysburg.

They need to know where to quickly find the data they need, know how to validate it, and then make the best use of it.

It’s true that having students learn the skills advocated by the Partnership in isolation makes no sense.

But then neither does having them memorize all the stuff in Hirsch’s curriculum and then asking them to spit selected pieces back on a standardized test.

It’s Not the 19th Century

Have you heard the buzz about 21st century skills? Forget it.

According to Jay Mathews, writing in this morning’s Post, the idea is doomed because millions of students are “still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math”.

Today on this page, we are ushering in the new year with the hottest trend in pedagogy, the latest program teachers are told they cannot live without. It is called 21st-century skills. Education policymakers, press agents and pundits can’t get enough of it.

I am not so impressed. I have been writing cranky columns about 21st-century skills on washingtonpost.com, calling the movement a pipe dream whose literature should be tossed in the trash.

He’s right, of course. As long as your idea of learning is limited to only what appears on standardized tests and the curriculum is narrowed to the very basic aspects of communicating with text.

Mathews is also buying into the instructional concept that students cannot possibly work on more complex topics until they have “mastered” the basics, an educational malpractice eloquently addressed in a companion article from the same section of the paper.

Thus, while there are building blocks of knowledge — students must master addition and subtraction before they multiply or divide — the idea that students should be taught facts and simple procedures before they get to problem-solving or critical thinking no longer makes sense. “The common idea that we can teach thinking without a solid foundation of knowledge must be abandoned. So must the idea that we can teach knowledge without engaging students in thinking. Knowledge and thinking must be intimately joined,” says Lauren Resnick, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and a leading expert on cognitive science.

And then we come back to the matter of the phrase “21st century skills” itself. That aspect really does belong in the trash.

The term has been overused and warped by politicians, education “experts”, and others to fit their specific view of what school reform should be. It has no meaning.

Let’s face it. The skills people need for successful living and working in the 21st century, are basically the same as they were in the previous century, the one before that, and the one before that.

They center around the ability to clearly communicate thoughts and ideas using the most effective tools available, as well as the need to understand the messages being addressed to us by others, again using a variety of tools.

Certainly that process involves reading and writing textual language as a foundation.

However, the tools for successful communications also also need to include elements from many areas of human knowledge and culture: music, logic, art, science, dance, programming, social interaction, math and much more.

Whatever name you apply, the most important part of all this is that we don’t live in the 19th century. Our networks and other technologies make this a very different time, one where information is easily obtained.

The core of education in this century must be focused on how to validate, manage, and apply that information, not on memorizing and spitting back huge blocks of it.

Update: Will posted a very thoughtful comment to Mathews’ articles and generated a great discussion in the process.

(Still) More Studying of 21st Century Skills

Do we really need another study with the conclusion that American schools are doing a bad job?

Well in this case, I may have to agree with at least some of their findings.

If students are to succeed in today’s complex economy, they need to know more than just English, math, science, and history. They also need a range of analytic and workplace skills. So says an important new report on 21st-century skills, which concludes that though Massachusetts schools have made impressive progress in the last 15 years, many students still don’t graduate with the abilities today’s jobs require.

Further, according to a recent study by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, state employers say high school graduates lack essential job skills.

Mastering those skills means learning how to think critically and creatively, work collaboratively, use the Internet to do research, and communicate clearly and effectively. Students also need to be responsible and accountable, to be up on the news, and to have a workable knowledge of economics and business.

So, how much of this do we really teach in most schools today? Around here, we are very much stuck in the 20th century.

I could quibble with a few of the points from the study outlined in this article (for one thing, training every student for the exclusive needs of business seems like a very narrow focus).

However, if we really want to address these “21st-century skills”, it’s going to take more than just rewriting the curriculum and retraining teachers.

We also need to change our basic perceptions of what it means to be “well educated” and how a person gets there.

BTW, how far into the 21st century are we going to discuss teaching 21st century skills until we actually do it? Or switch to calling them 22nd century skills?

Nice Phrases, Little Meaning

According to the headline topping the report of a new poll, the vast majority of Americans believe U.S. Students Need 21st Century Skills to Compete in a Global Economy

A new, nationwide poll of registered voters reveals that Americans are deeply concerned that the United States is not preparing young people with the skills they need to compete in the global economy.

An overwhelming 80 percent of voters say that the kind of skills students need to learn to be prepared for the jobs of the 21st century is different from what they needed 20 years ago. Yet a majority of Americans say that schools need to do a better job of keeping up with changing educational needs.

The results might be more encouraging if it wasn’t for the fact that the survey was paid for by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

And that the large companies behind the organization – Microsoft, Pearson, Blackboard, AT&T, Apple, Dell, etc. – have a huge interest in selling into the concepts being promoted by the Partnership.

Certainly, it’s hard to argue with the need for students to learn “critical thinking and problem-solving skills, computer and technology skills, and communication and self-direction skills”.

Who wouldn’t want to see a child learn all that? But exactly what does all that nice phrasing mean?

I doubt most of the respondents in the survey would agree on the terms, much less have any idea of just how radically the American educational system would have to change to help students actually learn those skills.

Unfortunately, the general public still wants to see numbers produced by NCLB-style standardized tests (and that fit easily into a 200 word report on the evening news) as “proof” that kids are learning.

However, very few of these “21st century skills” can be measured using multiple choice questions, something which this Partnership ignores with their support of the renewal of NCLB, although with some alterations.

As a side rant, can we also dump the meaningless phrase “21st century skills”? The attributes outlined by this and other organizations (with the possible exception of computer skills) would be appropriate for a successful adult of any century.