The Fall Preview

As many of you know, I create an eNewsletter each month for the staff members in my district. In this month's eNewsletter I take a real hard look at 21st Century Skills. Here is a snippet of my article. You can also click for the full eNewsletter for October. No doubt the message is loud and clear by now. 21st century skills are more then just buzz words. It isn’t going to be going away any time soon. In fact, people have been talking about this for more then 12 years now. A shift in education is happening, although it may be slower then many people had hoped or anticipated. Whether you have seen Sir Ken Robinson’s speech adapted by RSA Animate on his views for a need to shift the educational paradigm, or you have merely heard about it at faculty meetings, college courses, conferences, or even webinars, it has hopefully reached you at some point. So what are 21st Century Skills? We hear about them all the time, but why haven’t they just been defined and presented as curriculum goals or state standards by now for goodness sake? Well, they aren’t the easiest to completely define. It’s like taking a look into the future, although we are currently more then a decade into the 21st century, these skills are defined as those needed by the students of today to be successful within the world of tomorrow. This can present a few problems. How can we predict today what life will be like in 10, 15 or even 20 years? True, some things will not have changed too drastically by then, but unless you live under a rock, you have realized that technology has played a huge part in our lives over the past 10 years and continually evolves making life easier and more manageable. I mean the iPad that I received last fall is already way outdated! There are some great resources though for catching a glimpse into what 21st Century Skills look like and how they can be taught to our students of today. Web sites such as; The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has set up the framework towards skills needed to achieve success and be problem solvers for the world of tomorrow. Instead of set skills as we were used to in our educational experience, the skills are defined as ways to promote higher order thinking so that students can adapt to the ever changing ways of our world. 21st Century Skills aren’t all about the technology though. Technology will play a huge part in our shift in education, but it has been a huge part of our lives outside of school as well, so that makes sense. It’s true, technology will be used for many of the things we do, but it is just the tool, or conduit, towards the real learning. 21st Century Skills are more then just the latest technology trends. They are skills needed to be successful problem solvers and citizens of the future. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), defines these skills for students as; 1. Creativity and Innovation, 2. Communication and Collaboration, 3. Research and Information Fluency,4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making, 5. Digital Citizenship, and 6. Technology Operations and Concepts.
 The shift is already here, but we certainly need innovation leaders and risk takers to help educate students with this new shift in education. These people cannot be afraid to learn something new, even if that is from one of their own students. 21st Century leaders and educators must grasp this idea and promote real world thinking and problem solving. The world of tomorrow is closer then you may think!