21st Century Learning

For our class this week, we were asked to take a look at the site Partnership for 21^st Century Skills. You can reach it through this link: http://www.p21.org/ 

This assignment is part of our current Walden University course, where we are learning to integrate technology in our classrooms.

At first, when I looked at the site, it felt very much like an advertisement to buy their materials. Then I realised that many of the resources are free if you just want to download them, and I began to get a little more excited. As a recent focus in our education system in Bermuda, we have been looking at developing common core standards. While many of our assessments are British, we also have a large number of students taking tests like the SAT, and heading off to the United States and Canada for further education. For me, the design of the subject area maps seemed very helpful with its links to common core standards. I also really liked the inclusion of Interdisciplinary Themes (Global awareness, Financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy, Civic literacy, Health literacy, and Environmental literacy) into core subjects.

I also really enjoyed the little movie made by Peter Reynolds (author of one of my favourite read-alouds, “Ish”) called “Above and Beyond”, which really underlined the idea that creativity and cooperation are key 21^st century skills. I am actually planning to share it with my class this week as I think it will help them understand the value of these skill sets.

The emphasis on critical thinking skills seems key to this program, and I feel it is a most important skill that we just do not seem to be getting across to the students well. I also thought that there was a clear emphasis on including technologies, although there did not seem to be a thrust towards 2.0-type literacies specifically.

We were asked to comment on anything we disagreed with in the site, and I am not sure I specifically disagree with anything. I certainly agree that students need to master “multi-dimensional abilities” in order to be successful in this century. I suppose that the ways in which we as educators carry out the task of preparing our students to meet the 21^st century challenge are maybe a little less cut and dried than spelled out in this website, and perhaps the implementation of yet another program might not be the best way to encourage creativity in teachers. On the other hand, if you look at the kinds of tasks they were suggesting in the subject area maps, they do seem to allow for creativity and flexibility in implementation. The worry I would have is that our boards and other supervisory bodies might expect the process laid out here to be followed to the letter, which would seem to go against their idea of multi-literacies.

This is an interesting site, worth a visit, although their blog seems very technical, more of a professor’s blog than one I would subscribe to. If you visit, be sure to check out their subject maps! Here’s the Science one:

http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/21stcskillsmap_science.pdf