It
has become clear that teaching skills requires answering “What should
students learn in the 21st century?” on a deep and broad basis. Teachers
need to have the time and flexibility to develop knowledge, skills, and
character, while also considering the meta-layer/fourth dimension that
includes learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, and
personalisation. Adapting to 21st century needs means revisiting each
dimension and how they interact:
Knowledge - relevance
required: Students’ lack of motivation, and often disengagement,
reflects the inability of education systems to connect content to
real-world experience. This is also critically important to economic and
social needs, not only students’ wishes. There is a profound need to
rethink the significance and applicability of what is taught, and to
strike a far better balance between the conceptual and the practical.
Questions that should be answered include: Should engineering become a
standard part of the curriculum? Should trigonometry be replaced by more
statistics? Is long division by hand necessary? What is significant and
relevant in history? Should personal finance, journalism, robotics, and
other new disciplines be taught to everyone - and starting in which
grade? Should entrepreneurship be mandatory? Should ethics be re-valued?
What is the role of the arts – and can they be used to foster
creativity in all disciplines?
Skills – necessity for
education outcomes: Higher-order skills (“21st Century Skills”), such as
the “4 C’s” of Creativity, Critical thinking, Communication,
Collaboration, and others are essential for absorbing knowledge as well
as for work performance. Yet the curriculum is already overburdened with
content, which makes it much harder for students to acquire (and
teachers to teach) skills via deep dives into projects. There is a
reasonable global consensus on what the skills are, and how teaching
methods via projects can affect skills acquisition, but there is little
time available during the school year, given the overwhelming amount of
content to be covered. There is also little in terms of teacher
expertise in combining knowledge and skills in a coherent ensemble, with
guiding materials, and assessments.
“Character”
(behaviours, attitudes, values) – to face an increasingly challenging
world: As complexities increase, humankind is rediscovering the
importance of teaching character traits, such as performance-related
traits (adaptability, persistence, resilience) and moral-related traits
(integrity, justice, empathy, ethics). The challenges for public school
systems are similar to those for skills, with the extra complexity of
accepting that character development is also becoming an intrinsic part
of the mission, as it is for private schools.
Meta-Layer: Essential
for activating transference, building expertise, fostering creativity
via analogies, establishing lifelong learning habits, and so on. It will
answer questions such as: How should students learn how to learn? What
is the role of interdisciplinarity? What is the appropriate sequencing
within subjects and between subjects? How do we develop curiosity? How
do we facilitate students’ pursuing of their own passions in addition to
the standard curriculum? How do we adapt curricula to local needs?
So
what is actually being done to ensure that our workforce is skilled for
21st century success and to ensure that students are skilled, ready to
work and contribute to society?
The global transformation, often
called the "21st century skills" movement is helping move schools
closer to learning designs that better prepare students for success in
learning, work and life. The
OECD Skills Strategy
is responding to this by shifting the focus from a quantitative notion
of human capital, measured in years of formal education, to the skills
people actually acquire, enhance and nurture over their lifetimes. My
hope is that schools, universities and training programs will become
more responsive to the workforce and societal needs of today, and
students will increasingly focus on growing and applying essential 21st
century skills and knowledge to real problems and issues, not just
learning textbook facts and formulas.
This will raise levels of
creativity and innovation, and provide better skills , better jobs,
better societies, and ultimately better lives.
Links:21st Century Skills – Learning for Life in our Times, by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, Wiley.
Center for Curriculum Redesign
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8035-0091
