As a teacher and you as a reader may be wondering how to prepare students of today for the work force of tomorrow. There is a particular website that outlines how to prepare your students for that. The websites name is www.P21.com. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is a national organization that advocates for 21st century readiness for every student. Looking around the website very quickly I found a video titled: Fusing the Three Rs and Four Cs for 21st Century Readiness by Ken Kay, President of P21 who discusses briefly the urgency of fusing the traditional three Rs of education with the four Cs: communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. I really did not get much out of his video because he did not say how to go about fusing all of this together. He just states that we must. I did however get a lot of informatio about the four C's in a graph posted on the site.
It does have a very nice graph of the Framework for 21st Century, http://www.p21.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=119. There is a useful list of subject areas/themes that can be integrated into any curriculum to prepare students for the work force of tomorrow. My only obstacle is finding the time to teach the extra material, but with practice time will not be an issue. Integrating technology will be second nature. Some of the items on the graph were: Global awareness, Financial literacy, Civic literacy, Health literacy, and Environmental literacy.
This website is very useful for educators. There are good examples of how teachers are teaching the 21st century skills in their classrooms. I also liked the clear explanations of the framework that were posted at: http://www.p21.org/documents/P21_Framework_Definitions.pdf
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that it would take time to incorporate teaching these skills into our classroom. We need to start teaching what we can with the resources that we do have. One way that I plan to do this is by requiring my students to collaborate more on solving problems and using critical thinking. This will help the students in the future because they will be required to do this at work. It is part of my job to prepare my students for the future. They will need 21st century kills to be successful outside of school, so I must try to teach them.
I like the way you posted your comments. It is easy for the readers to follow rather than sounding like a response to an assignment for class! Time is an issue that everyone has mentioned. It would be great to be given time to collaborate with my teaching colleagues using this website as a main tool. What ways have you learned to help your students use critical thinking skills in groups? These are some of the hardest skills to teach because they demand not only basic skills but also synthesizing as well as group interaction/dynamic skills. It is an increasingly difficult job we have!
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