TEACHING 21ST CENTURY SKILLS

 According to Kurshan 2017,  “21st century skills” refers to a range of abilities and competencies that go beyond what has traditionally been taught in the classroom, including problem solving, communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation. 

Others define the term as “information literacy, media literacy, and information, communication and technology literacy.”👉

The science of learning can be distilled into some points(Rosefky 2016), all of which are about how students learn 21st century skills and how pedagogy can address new learning needs.

😉😉Make it relevant

To be effective, any curriculum must be relevant to students’ lives. Transmission and rote memorization of factual knowledge can make any subject matter seem irrelevant. Irrelevance leads to lack of motivation, which in turn leads to decreased learning.

👷👷Teach through the disciplines

Through disciplinary curriculum and instruction students should learn why the discipline is important, how experts create new knowledge, and how they communicate about it.

😌😌Teach students to learn how to learn

There is a limit to the skills, attitudes, and dispositions that students can learn through formal schooling. Therefore, educating them for the 21st century requires teaching them how to learn on their own. To do so, students need to be aware of how they learn.

👉👉Make full use of technology to support learning

Technology offers the potential to provide students with new ways to develop their problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills, and transfer them to different contexts.

I have already recognized that teaching 21st century skills is not just about flinging more ideas or more tablets or more Smartboards at schools and students. I believe that the way to get better ideas is not just to ask one set of stakeholders their opinion about what might work well. Instead, better ideas require efforts to engage many stakeholders in an ongoing conversation about our fast-changing world and about what skills and competencies students will need to stake their claim to a place in the world.

Bibliography

Barbara Kurshan JULY 18, 2017 Teaching 21st Century Skills for 21st Century Success.

Anna Rosefsky March, 2016 Teaching and Learningh 21ºst Century Skills