21st Century Skills: Postscript

Posted on | January 10, 2009 | 3 Comments

For a too-short 40 minutes or so yesterday, I had the pleasure of joining Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Will Richardson, Jeff Utecht, Caroline Novak and David DeSchryver in leading a great discusssion about 21st century skills. My contribution was fortified by the varied comments that I received on my previous post and by rummages though earlier discussions on my own blog and elsewhere around the subject. The task of Will, Jeff, myself and the others in the small group was to set the scene for a much larger group of educationists from Newport News, Virginia, who were taking part in a symposium on 21st century education, led by Sheryl.

It became evident almost from the first comments made and questions asked by the good people from Newport News, that we were speaking to a group many of whom had already been thinking hard about the changing needs of education today, and who, I am sure, are already working hard to put their thinking into practice.

For my own initial contribution, I offered a few words along the following lines:

There undoubtedly is, in my mind, a set of skills that we might justifiably define as especially pertinent to the first decade of the 21st century (and almost certainly beyond), but I think they need to be split into two distinct groups (at least):

The first group includes those skills that have always been important, but that for various reasons, can be brought together as being of particular importance in the context of the highly complex and shifting world we find ourselves living in today – these might be seen as skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative working, leadership, adaptability, entrepreneurialism in its widest sense, and so on;
The second group includes those that I feel are, in many ways, either new skills or skills that have acquired some new and unprecedented aspects, the need for which have arisen because of some peculiar characteristics of life in the early years of the 21st century – in this category I would include those skills we require to be able to make sense of current and significant issues, such as: personal identity, personal integrity, personal protection and safety, dealing with information overload (ie the need to filter good from bad, useful from useless, wheat from chaff), the nature of friendship in a virtual world, and the balancing act we all have to undertake between personal privacy and the openness/transparency needed to work and learn in today’s hyper-connected world.

In my view there are many schools, and many school districts, around the world that are already dealing successfully with the first group of skills; however, I believe there are very few, anywhere in the world, that really know how to deal fully and effectively with the second group.

I realise these groupings, and even the notion of any particular sets of skills being especially pertinent to the world we now live in, are highly debatable across so many different dimensions. I did begin my starting contribution with the admission that my own thinking in this area is, I feel, far from complete. I had some sympathy for Jeff’s view that we should now drop the term ’21st century skill’ as unhelpful, although I do think – as I have said many times before in various blog posts and comments elsewhere – that the social-technological basis of the world we inhabit is sufficiently different from what has gone before to suggest a need to identify and define anew the skills we need to be able to live and work and learn successfully in this new set of conditions.

I made the point that, while we do need to understand the importance of skills in the modern world, we also need to understand that skills are taught and learned (and deployed) in the broader context of knowledge, attitudes and, critically, values.

And I, and others, pointed to the need, in all of this discussion, to retain a strong foothold in the primacy of literacy and of language – although there are, of course, a range of issues to be discussed and understood too around that set of ‘other’ literacies that do not necessarily have their roots in language – such as art, music, dance, and so on.

All in all, the 40 minutes was hugely enjoyable, and even from my remote location in Scotland, linked via Elluminate, I was aware of the excitement and the sense of purpose in that room in Newport News 3000-or-so miles away. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and it was lovely to get the chance to work briefly with the likes of Sheryl, Will and Jeff in particular, all of whom I read and follow regularly within our global community of bloggers on education.

Technorati Tags: newport news, sheryl nussbaum-beach, will richardson, jeff utecht, caroline novak, david deschryver, 21st century skills, knowledge, attitudes, values

Category: change, education, epistemology, knowledge, language, learning, literacy, schooling, social technology, society, teaching, transformation

Comments

3 Responses to “21st Century Skills: Postscript”

David Gilmour
January 10th, 2009 @ 9:48 pm

To learn the second group of skills, schools will need to confront the need to provide access to the 21st century technological environment. Perhaps the way in which many aspects of the environment are routinely blocked (web sites) or prohibited (mobiles) in schools has a lot to do with the continuing lack of progress in this area?
Jeff Utecht
January 17th, 2009 @ 6:08 am

It was an honor to be in the session with you as well. Like you I hope the participants in Newport News for a brief minute anyway, were able to experience how these connections across distance and time zones can be so powerful.
John Connell
January 17th, 2009 @ 10:35 am

@David – I agree completely, David – not just a lack of progress but an almost complete indifference to the need – there are too many people making these important decisions who simply have no inkling of what the real issues are at this juncture.

@Jeff – Likewise, Jeff – I thought it was a genuinely compelling event, despite the short time that it lasted. I hope to work with you again at some point.