Evaluating 21st Century Skills

As I visited the site, Partnership for 2st Century Learning, http://www.p21.orghttp://www.p21.orgI knew I had been here before, as I am always reading watching the trends so I can stay up to date in my own teaching. I clicked on a few links and found myself looking at the Geography and 21st Century Skills page. Eighth grade objectives had students looking at web images of countries, and I immediately thought of using Google Earth. Students were to look at the different shapes of the countries and their specific geographic surroundings to evaluate how those countries’ shapes and exact location could affect the political nature of the country. This is clearly deeper thinking than most Social Studies classes require of their students at the 8th grade level.

As I contemplate some of these deep thinking activities, I realize that we have not prepared our students for this deep reflective questioning. Students come to my support periods to complete homework in Social Studies and to get the answers done. They rarely read, but instead scan the page to ‘find’ the answer, much like a mother who has left her older child in charge of her younger child and spins through the store to get exactly what she needs knowing she just has to get it done quickly. When we ‘give’ homework to students which does not really require thinking skills but rather search and find skills, they walk away empty handed and losing out on valuable learning potential. Most students think of the work they do in class and especially the homework, as busywork. Students have not been taught to read, and stop to think about the material. Then continue to read stopping to think, and finally respond. Perhaps that could be a good use of a Wiki or web page, requiring students to read and reflect, rather than rush to just answer the questions as posed at the end of the chapter. Instead for most students, it’s a hodgepodge of get it done. How sad that these same students are relatively successful, yielding good grades for accomplishing little in the way of analytical and reflective thinking.

Moving on to the English and Collaboration goal page, I liked the idea of researching a piece of historical fiction as a collaborative team and posting that research with web links, to a class or group Wiki. Here students have read a piece of historical fiction and worked in teams to delve deeper into the story behind the story. It’s through that deep exploration that these 8th graders will connect the realistic historical references from the book and more, to the story presented to them in historical documents. They also are defining and strengthening their collaboration skills doing these types of activities. Teachers could scaffold the project and have a student research housing and they could draw the types of houses from that period of time in history. Other students could research the clothes of the day, finding images or using ipad apps to make realistic recreations of a person dressed from that time period. This level of instruction, fact finding, collaboration, and authorship really will require a different classroom model. Long gone is the teacher as the leader and expert holder of information. Now, the teacher needs to teach information, skills, and then teach students how to search for information and build and develop their Wiki or their project based web page. In this new scenario, the teacher plays numerous more roles and will need to jockey between the roles to scaffold, as needed. Today’s teacher in this classroom will be: teacher, technology integrator, search guru, and a collaborative conductor.

I landed on a page,under Tools and Resources, that took me on a ride to “Route 21 Overview”. Once again, all the great things we can and should be doing, but there exists a major disconnect between what is possible and what is probable given our limited technology, digital tools and infrastructure in our individual buildings. It occurred to me as I was looking at this site, that perhaps we need to stop housing classrooms in separate and distinct school buildings and instead move into the very corporate buildings that will house these very students as workers in 8, 10, 15 years. If we pulled all of our teachers, principals and different levels of students and walked them down the street to the office buildings, setting up shop there, we would have the infrastructure and the digital tools, plus really nice corporate spaces to work in. The cafeteria would probably have better food than the school lunch program provides. It’s crazy to think that we might need to do just that to get the digital resources we need, so we can ‘actually’ do all the incredible ideas as espoused on the Partnership for 21st Century Learning site. Will it be almost the 22nd century when we finally are ‘tooled’ for the 21st Century, I wonder?

Under the Policy makers link, I traveled to ‘state initiatives’ and found my teaching state of NH isn’t even listed, hence part of the problem. Only 14 states out of 50 are listed. Should this be a concern to anyone who is screaming that American schools are not doing enough? Isn’t this a relevant piece of the puzzle? As stated on the About Us, area of the Partnership For 21st Century Skills, “21st Century Skills are no longer just for the top tier, or just for those students headed to college, but essential for all students.”(Partnership For 21st Century Skills, http://www.p21.org/about-us/our-history )

As discussed in the article, The New Literacies, the essential basic skill of reading has changed with these new digital technologies. As a reading teacher, I am not only teaching students decoding, breaking up of words, how to figure out unknown vocabulary in the content of sentences, but I am thankfully teaching students reading in my class using digital tools.

“Foundational or traditional literacy is about print on a page, or decoding and making sense of words, images and other content that a reader can string together and then begin to comprehend. They are the words and pictures students read and pore over that are contained in textbooks,in novels, on standardized tests, and even in comic books. The new literacies encompass much more. Their utility lies in online reading comprehension and learning skills, or 21st century skills, required by the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs), including content found on wikis, blogs, video sites, audio sites and in e-mail. They require the ability not just to “read” but also to navigate the World Wide Web, locate information, evaluate it critically, synthesize it and communicate it—all skills that are becoming vital to success in this century’s economy and workforce.”(Miners & Pascopella, 2007)

The implications are clear that if we are not using digital tools to teach today, we are shortchanging our student learners. We need to passionately demand these tools using resources like the Partnership for 21st Century Learning as a way to communicate to those school based policy makers, that spending money on digital resources is not shopping for a fine wine on a beer budget but rather, is as essential as clean drinking water for our student learners and for our society as a whole.

Works Cited:

Miners, Z., & Pascopella, A. (2007). The new literacies. District Administration, 43(10), 26–34. Used by permission.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills, retrieved November 21, 2012, from http://www.p21.org/