Integrating 21st Century Skills - Interdisciplinary Themes

“The current and future health of America’s 21st Century Economy depends directly on how broadly and deeply Americans reach a new level of literacy—‘21st Century Literacy’—that includes strong academic skills, thinking, reasoning, teamwork skills, and proficiency in using technology.”- 21st Century Workforce Commission National Alliance of Business

For educators who are responsible for educating the nation's youth, the above referenced observation translates into one of the most significant educational challenges of our time.

How do we integrate interdisciplinary 21st century skills with our existing academic standards in a manner that allows for mastery of said core subjects while providing our students with the skills that they will need to prepare for an increasingly complex life and diverse work environments of the 21st century?

As I reviewed relevant 21st century literature and discussed the same with my colleagues, there seems to be a consensus that referent mastery of core subjects should take place contextually within 21st century interdisciplinary themes, as outlined by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, to include, but not limited to:

(1) Global Awareness: A conceptual understanding of global and cultural perspectives to include environmental, social, cultural, political, and economic relations concepts and applicable knowledge.

(2) Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy: A real world understanding of the economy in our society to include the personal economic choices available thereof as well as possessing the 21st century business and entrepreneurial skills to effectively participate in the workplace and the career options available. Please refer to this excellent resource:

(3) Civic Literacy: The ability to keep informed as well as obtaining a tangible understanding of governmental processes that translates into effective and active participation in civic life.

(4) Health Literacy: The ability to understand prescription instructions, appointment slips, medical brochures, consent forms, and the ability to negotiate complex health care systems and apply these skills to health situations.

(5) Environmental Literacy: “Essentially the capacity to perceive and interpret the relative health of ecosystems and take appropriate action to maintain, restore, or improve the health of these systems” (Disinger & Roth, 1992).

Notwithstanding the need to overhaul our educational standards to reflect the interdisciplinary contextual themes as discussed above, we must ensure that we are also preparing our students for the complexities and varied work environments that living in the 21st century will present, to include creative innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative communications as well as contemporary information, media and technology skills.

As discussed in the 2009 MILE Guide: Milestones for Improving Learning & Education, "people in the 21st century live in a technology and media-driven environment, marked by access to an abundance of information, rapid changes in technology tools and the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions on an unprecedented scale."

The implications for the future are very clear, providing us the appropriate social, technological, and economic framework that should guide our efforts as we craft the necessary educational reforms that will help to transform our educational institutions into contemporary 21st century learning centers and to adequately prepare our students for the 21st century.

It's a sign of the changing times, just take a look around us and we see the signs everywhere to include emerging telecommunication and IT technologies like IPods, PDAs, Remote Access, Web Conferencing, Telecommuting and Globalization, Cloud Computing, and Skype to name a few.

Just ten years ago most of these established technologies didn't exist or were not considered vital to the collective knowledge and skills that a person needed to have to be productive in the workforce. Not so today, as these emerging technologies and globalization are radically changing and shaping the very nature of the workforce that many of our students will be participating in, necessitating a correspondingly vigorous and careful evaluation of our educational standards to ensure that we prepare our students for the 21st century.

Take Boeing, Inc. for example and its use of web conferencing software produced by WebEx, that allowed thousands of Boeing engineers to design and build their airplanes from remote desktops from all over the world, and at staggering cost reductions. If Boeing's global collaboration environment is a sign of things to come, what do you think Boeing is looking for on a resume these days?

Conversely, Secretary Arne Duncan, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Education and Workforce Summit, recently remarked that "according to a 2008 report on workforce readiness by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, many college graduates are not ready to work." She continued by stating that "most high school graduates are simply deficient for even entry-level jobs."

If Secretary Arne Duncan's comments provide an insight to the state of American education, it seems that we have our work cut out for us.

But, be it as it may, this is the world we live in and this is the world that we need to prepare our students for, if they are to be successful in the 21st Century.

Now is the time for all us collectively to raise the educational bar for the sake of our students' futures.

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Personal Opinion Disclaimer

The opinions of the author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of any particular educational institution.

Moreover, comments or opinions expressed on the Blog are those of their respective contributors only. The views expressed by the author or outside contributors do not represent the views of any educational institution, their respective management, or employees.

The intent of this blog is to provide a place where educators can kick off their shoes, relax, and express what is on their minds, hopefully stimulating a sincere and honest dialogue about issues that we all face as educators, nothing more nothing less.

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Re-Tooling for the 21st Century

The other day I was analyzing a variety of nationwide results from standardized tests as part of our school's efforts to use data to drive our decision-making efforts vis-à-vis our school's improvement process. What I found was a perplexing nationwide downward trend over the last 10 years which seemed to cut across all genders, races, and ethnicity.

Given the advent of the world wide wide, the availability of information sources in an array of contextual formats, and the technology literacy levels of today's students, you would think that they would be fairing better than those students of 10 years ago, but instead we are seeing an overall decline in said standardized test results, somewhat counter intuitive.

Moreover, it seems that gains that we had made over the years are being reversed as we are seeing the widening of the gender, racial, and ethnicity gaps. We are even seeing the "white" students in decline. What is going on?

Not only are our students doing worse on standardized tests, their drop out rates are on the rise as well. According to a report was written by Paul E. Barton, one third of our students are leaving school without a diploma.

How do we stem the tide? How do we make a difference in these students lives who face a tenuous future to say the least, especially as we deal with these uncertain times and dismal economy.

Which brings me to something that I have been wrestling with lately as our School Improvement Committee attempts to address professional development for our teachers. What specific skills do we need to have as contemporary educators to ensure that we prepare our students for the 21st century? What teaching methodologies do we need to have to change the aforementioned trends in our standardized testing? Are these standardized results even relevant?

More importantly, how do we go about creating a culture of change within our educational institutes that enables our tried and true educators, who have been in the game for quite awhile, to align their teaching skills with the need to craft educational experiences that enable our students to be productive world citizens who can compete in a 21st century global economy?

Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about their desire, as the educators I know are awesome people who truly care about our students and the education that they provide. But what I am talking about is their ability to leverage the current technology to raise the educational bar to another level, setting the stage for significant reforms in our schools, our classrooms, and ultimately within ourselves.

Notwithstanding our desire to be at the cutting edge, wheeling and dealing like a true technocrat, we find that technology is extremely illusive, changing at such a phenomenal rate that it is even difficult for those of us who are somewhat technically suave to keep up with.

When taken together with our existing workloads, parent conferences, field trips, coaching, curriculum development, grading papers, creating evaluation rubrics, attending committee meetings, and all the other things we do as educators, where do we find the time to learn these 21st century technology skills to transform our classrooms into 21st learning centers for our students.

How do we equip those educators with 21st century tools, helping them to transform all those wonderful years of teaching experience into efficient teaching strategies that effectively prepare our student for the 21 century, especially when you consider their varied re-tooling needs and levels of readiness for change?

Needless to say, today's students are all together a different breed of learners, who have grown up using the web to do anything from playing computer games, to downloading podcast, to blogging, to texting, creating MySpace web pages, and the like. Information, videos, blogs, podcast, content of any kind is at the touch of their fingers.

Not only has the the web truly transformed our lives, but it also has changed the way we interpret the world around us, the way we learn, the way we obtain information sources, how we eventually find our place in this world, and even changing our educational delivery systems, methodologies, and curriculum content.

The future is here, but as more things change, it seems that the more somethings remain the same, especially our ability to adapt to said changes.

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Personal Opinion Disclaimer

The opinions of the author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of any particular educational institution.

Moreover, comments or opinions expressed on the Blog are those of their respective contributors only. The views expressed by the author or outside contributors do not represent the views of any educational institution, their respective management, or employees.

The intent of this blog is to provide a place where educators can kick off their shoes, relax, and express what is on their minds, hopefully stimulating a sincere and honest dialogue about issues that we all face as educators, nothing more nothing less.

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